Parking in San Francisco is a pain and I always dreaded visiting some of my friends as i knew i’d be circling for a long long time.

That is, until i met Luxe. They are an on-demand valet service. About 10 minutes before you arrive somewhere, you open the app and drop a pin at where you’re going. They will then have someone meet you there who will then take your car and park it for you in one of their lots. The valets cruise around on little foot scooters which they put into your trunk when they take your car.

Also, you can have them bring your car to a different spot than where you dropped it off. So, on a friday night if I meet my friend at his house and then we walk to dinner and then take a Lyft/Uber to a movie/show somewhere, i can then have my car delivered to me once we’re all done so I can drive home.

The price is what makes it doable. It’s $5 an hour or $15 daily max. It’s less than most garages in the city but with more convenience.

They also have a $300 monthly unlimited use rate which is also cool if you want to use it for work or if you don’t have a parking spot at home. I somehow doubt that it’s that profitable, or profitable at all as a business, but if VC’s want to fund my convenience, i’ll take them up on that offer.

This is post #9 about the Qloud experience. The previous post was about about how we used YouTube as a music engine. Read that post here.

The year is 2007 and we’re building as fast as we can our new music service. It’s going to be a full-powered music streaming service on top of a collaborative music search engine and it’s going to be sweet.

Before we launched I went out to lunch with Sean Parker (known by many of you as Justin Timberlake in the movie The Social Network). At the time he had left Facebook and was about a year into his new VC gig at Founders Fund. We sat down to lunch and the subject immediately turned to our upcoming launch. He asked, “Hey, do you know about Facebook’s platform?” I didn’t and he went to explain it to me. Basically FB needed a way to expand and what better way than have companies build their product in to Facebook. While the 3rd party companies would provide the development, Facebook would allow you to message and add their users as your users. It sounded cool.

I went back to the team and explained this upcoming launch. I got in touch with Dave Morin (yep, the Path founder used to be head of Facebook platform) and he gave us access to the platform. Our plan was to build a subset of our service on Facebook and gain some early users. Then, when we launched our new website we could make a claim that says, “We already have 10,000 users on Facebook.”

It did not go that way at all.

Launching on Facebook right when the Platform was launching was probably one of the best things we did. Because it was new, it had a bunch of early adopters. It also had a bunch of loopholes that allowed us to market and message millions of users. If you remember getting a ton of requests to join some stupid game, that was the platform. We used to do things like “You can’t install our app unless you invite 30 friends.” and people did it.

Of course Facebook wasn’t happy about this, but we weren’t going to stop. Kudos goes to our colleague Noah who really figured out how to growth hack the crap out of it.

Lessons learned: at both Kapost and Qloud, we grew because we attached ourselves to a tidal wave in the industry. In Qloud it was the Facebook platform and Kapost it was Content Marketing. Facebook eventually would shut down the platform but not until much later. Heck, even Zynga used it to become a billion dollar company. Sometimes the bright and shiny new thing in the industry is worth going after.

One of my little pet peeves is how people use their dock on their Mac.

Here’s my logic. What do you do most on your computer? You read web pages from top to bottom. Because of this, your page is maximized from top to bottom and you spend most of your time scrolling. There is usually extra space to the sides of the page.

Why then, do you take up extra space on the bottom of the page with a dock? You are constrained vertically but have surplus horizontally. It makes so much sense for you to have your dock on the left or the right.

If you have it on the bottom and set to hide that solves most of the problem, but because you scroll so much up and down, you can hit your dock by accident a bit. But it works.

Verizon is buying AOL for 4.4B. It could be about ad-tech. It could be about mobile. It could be about content. I’m not sure why it’s happening and i’m pretty sure that it’s not going to work out well for Verizon. But, more than anything to me, the sale feels like an epilogue to part of internet history.

AOL is specail to me. It was my first job out of college. I had a great boss and I learned a ton. I met some amazing people, many of them have become good friends that i still talk with today. I also learned all the reasons why working at a big company sucks and it drove me to want to work at smaller, more nimble companies.

I also think that the AOL / Time Warner merger is a misunderstood story. Let me defend it for a second.

Here was the premise: AOL had lots of digital capabilities and was a fast growing internet company. Time Warner was an “old media” company that had lots of valuable media assets (HBO, Warner Music, CNN, Warner Bros., Time Inc., TW Cable). The idea was that AOL would inject it’s web design, technology and knowhow into each division. For example, it could offer web video for TW Cable or digital media solutions (a player and online store) for Warner Music. Apparently AOL SVP Miles Gilbourne came up with the plan. Steve Case pitched it to then-Time Warner CEO Jerry Levin and they all agreed.

As part of the merger, Steve Case would become Chairman, Levin would be CEO, and there would be co-COO’s in Dick Parsons from Time Warner and Bob Pittman from AOL. This was thought of as a merger of equals.

But what actually happened is that once the merger actually was finalized, Levin decided that he didn’t like that original plan, said “fuck it,” and decided to make AOL just another unit in the Time Warner set of divisions. Case was somewhat powerless as Chairman to stop him and the rest is history. None of the bold and cool ideas that were on paper at the time of the merger actually happened and the sad slow decline of AOL began.

As part of this, i went to work in the Corporate Technology group at AOL Time Warner corporate. We sat above all the divisions and it was our responsibility to figure out ways for each group to better work together. I remember one off-site where all the CTO’s got together and were patting each other on the back for making the Harry Potter trailer – a Warner Bros film with a trailer appearing on AOL’s homepage – one of the most viewed trailers of all time. Everybody was mumbling the words “synergy” and feeling good about themselves.

I’ll always remember what happened next. Steve Case rolled into the meeting and got up and basically said, “you guys need to challenge yourselves more. Showing a movie trailer is not changing the future. We have amazing assets and amazing talent, and if the only thing we’re getting excited about is promoting a movie trailer, then we’ve got real problems.”

He was right. The merger could have done some amazing things. But it didn’t. It was a failure because:

AOL was powerless to do anything but operate as a silo

Steve Case wasn’t running the company, Jerry Levin was.

Time Warner was scared of changing

Thus, the long slow decline occurred.

Thanks for the good memories AOL. It was quite a ride while it lasted.

Service Providers: These companies hire employees who provide services to customers or produce billable hours for which they charge. Examples include United Healthcare, Accenture, and JP Morgan.

Technology Creators: These companies develop and sell intellectual property such as software, analytics, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology. Examples include Microsoft, Oracle, and Amgen.

Network Orchestrators. These companies create a network of peers in which the participants interact and share in the value creation. They may sell products or services, build relationships, share advice, give reviews, collaborate, co-create and more. Examples include eBay, Red Hat, and Visa, Uber, Tripadvisor, and Alibaba.

And of those four, the Network Orchestrators are rewarded the most in the market:

Because they actually generate better business numbers:

It makes sense as these businesses can scale faster and more efficiently than any traditional business. I’m always a bit amazed that eBay isn’t more recognized as the leader and pioneer in this category. What they did 15 years ago is what many of the marketplaces are trying to replicate today. Kudos to them.

Yesterday, Kapost announced that it closed another $10 million dollars, some of it from Salesforce. Salesforce is the arguably the biggest and most badass B2B company on the planet so to get an investment and endorsement from them is huge.

This is a great accomplishment for the team. It’s never easy raising money and this round took around 4 months to put together (maybe more)

Also, Megan over at Techstars shot a video of us in the office and just pushed it out. Here it is:

The year is 2007 and Toby and I have a great idea to build a comprehensive music service. There were no web streaming services at the time. Some of the players were:

eMusic – a service for indie artists where you could download mp3’s.

PressPlay – a Sony sponsored music service that has only 2 labels and also required a download

Rhapsody – a pretty good service that required a player download and costs $20 a month

We started building the service and went around to all the music labels and providers we could find to license the actual tracks so we could serve up the songs to our users. Turns out that’s not easily done in 2007. To get music you have to strike individual deals with each individual label. Those deals require time (which we didn’t have) and money for upfront payments (which we didn’t have). Hmmm.

Luckily we figured out a nice loophole. Google bought YouTube in 2006. Right before that acquisition YouTube gave equity to the music labels. In exchange for this equity, they struck a deal that forbid the labels from suing YouTube for 2-3 years (I’m not sure of the length). This was a little-known fact, but it was true.

It is also true that almost every music track in existence is available on YouTube. This was pre-Vevo. So, we decided that our backend streaming service will actually be powered by YouTube. Nobody had every tried this, but it allowed us to (a) serve all our music for free; (b) be legal; (c) embed our music right into a browser without asking uses to download a player.

We did one other smart thing. Turns out there are many many videos for each song. Some are correct and some aren’t. We didn’t have time to go through millions of tracks, so we build into the service the ability for users to mark which YouTube video is correct for that track. They could play up to 10 different videos and vote for their favorite. By default, we play the video with the most votes. This tuned out to work really well. Once we launched our users would spend hours voting on videos and helping us curate our library.

We build the service in 4-5 months. Now we just needed to launch. Read about how that went in the next post…

It’s now the Spring of 2007. We’ve been doing the company for a little over a year and we were running out of money. We had rounds of funding spelled out in our deal with Revolution, but for the next round they could fund us or not at their discretion. When we brought up the subject to them, they decided to not fund us.

When an existing investor decides not to invest in your company, you’re dead. Nobody wants to invest in a company if the people who are closest to it and who know it best don’t want to invest. To their credit, Revolution knew this and decided to help us. They decided that they would go around with us to other investors and tell them the story that they’re getting out of the music and digital media business and they want to bring someone in who has the time and can focus on this market. They messaged that this wasn’t the type of business they wanted their firm to focus on. Essentially, “it’s us, not them.”

What Revolution didn’t know is that we had decided to pivot our product and business to be more ambitious and powerful. We knew from our feedback that users didn’t want just search results, but they wanted on-demand, unlimited streams. So, we decided to focus on delivering a music streaming service instead of a search service. It was a bold move but we were looking at the end. We lost our investors and had no traction. These were dark days indeed. Anyone who has been there knows how bad this time can be.

As they say, it’s always darkest before dawn, and that was true for us. We were fortunate that our new vision really resonated with the new investors we were pitching to. They loved it and started leaning in. When Revolution saw that, they then reconsidered their position of bailing on us and decided to come back in for another round of funding. Hurray!

We then negotiated another round of (i think) $1mm and we now had the runway to live another day and start building this new vision we had.

Of course there were big technical problems and other problems ahead, but for now we were saved

Looking back at this period, the big lesson i learned is that in a startup if something isn’t working you need to kill it and do something else immediately. Success is binary and if you’re product isn’t immediately successful, it probably won’t ever be and even more importantly, you don’t have the time to see if it will be.

As Charles De Mar (aka the actor Curtis Armstrong) says in the movie Better Off Dead, “Ski down really really fast. If something gets in your way…… TURN.”

We had launched the world’s first music search service that searched on tags and usage. It was revolutionary. The problem was that nobody cared. The amount of use we had was small. Granted, we didn’t iterate on it much and maybe over time usage would have increased, but out of the gates it was DOA.

The few thousand customers we had we talked to and grabbed feedback from. They wanted more. Just a list of songs wasn’t enough. They wanted everything. Specifically:

On-demand music. They see a track, they want to click and play it right then and right there (in the browser)

Major label music – all the popular stuff for the 4 major music labels

Indie label music – all the niche stuff from the dozens of indie labels

Unlimited music – they wanted no limit to what they could do (unlike radio stations)

Free. They didn’t want to pay because the alternative at the time (Kazaa, Bit Torrent, etc.) were all free

So, we decided to focus on delivering a full-featured music streaming service instead of a music search service. It was a bold move, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

It turns out we were right. This was the right direction as you’ll see in a later post. However, it created different problems such as:

How do you build a business around free music? (answer: you can’t)

How do you make the record labels happy if you’re not charging? (answer: you can’t)

Technically, how do you get the music to serve to the users? We’ll address in a later post.

I learned a valuable lesson here in that you shouldn’t be afraid to drastically change your service if your usage is low. Don’t hang on to past work just because of the sunk costs. I’ll credit Toby for being super bold. Toby is not one to do things half-assed. He likes to pick a direction and go full steam in that direction. It’s tough to make a decision to throw away a year’s worth of work.

This would come in handy later when we did something similar at Kapost.

When we started building Qloud we found some developers in Romania. This wasn’t just Bucharest, this was a town 8 hours NW of Bucharest in the mountains of Transylvania. We started with 3 or 4 developers and they fit our budget nicely ($15/hr back then). The early guys were Luci (team lead), Sergiu, Mitza, Dragos and Szaby. The owner of the company was Dan Masca.

Dan is a fatastic guy. He also sort of runs the town. It seems that he employs about 1.5x more people than he needs to just because he wants them to have jobs. He also buys computers for many of the local business and schools. Walking the streets with Dan, you get the idea that he’s something of a saint in that town.

The developers were also great. We talked with them every morning at 8am EST for about 2-4 hours about what we were building. There was no language barrier. In fact, when we started Kapost in 2009 we started it with Szaby and Mitza. Those two are studs. Mitza left Kapost after 4 years to start his own company and Szaby is still with us and one of our most trusted and senior developers.

In 2006, once we raised money, we thought it’d be good for the team if we all met in person and got to know each other. Thus, Toby and I flew to Romania to see them. We flew into Bucharest and then took a train to Targu Mures.

Some interesting things I remember:

The food is truly eastern European. Lots of sausage and mustard and beer. We found a place called Pizza Mix that was our favorite place to eat. We also liked how they had a Pizza Hut certification on the wall.

You can tell that it’s only a decade or two away from being communist. Almost everyone there remembers the communism regime as their parents were given jobs and housing from his for many years.

There’s a nightclub that is underground and has all of the walls padded. I’m glad I hadn’t seem the movie Hostel when I went there.

There’s an amazing place called Weekend which is a monstrous swimming pool. The pool is only 18 inches to 2 feet deep and the entire thing is about a circle that is 300 yards diameter and all around the edges are bars and restaurants. People go there and just hang out. It’s incredible.

One time we were flying out there and our luggage was lost. The airline gave us the equivalent of $40 to go buy new clothes until they were found. We then went to a Romanian Walmart and bought shirts. Toby bought a 7-pack of wife beaters to be his shirts for the entire trip. Good times.

Some thoughts on outsourced development in general:

Do i endorse offshore development? I do, especially if there are budget issue and/or if you have high upfront needs but lower on-going needs.

What are the drawbacks of offshore? You should have a full understanding that they are still an offshore development consultancy which typically means you are paying way less for (a) developers that are, on average, a bit worse than you would hire in-house (at least that’s been my experience); (b) communication is sometimes challenging; (c) written documentation is mandatory – even for what appears to be simple tasks. Also, because they are consultants, they are going on a project-by-project basis which means they will work hard to define the project before working on it to ensure there isn’t a lot of feature-creep once it gets started. This can be a pain but there is often scope creeping by you (the client) and thus they need to – and should – do it.

What is needed to make communication work? I think it can be done by Skype, especially if you use balsalmiq or other wireframe tools. If there is brainstorming that you need to do with the engineers, then i’d suggest a visit. But if it’s just conveying the details you already know, save you couple thousand of dollars and just make your requirement documents better.

Qloud’s initial product was a music search engine. It was based on a few assumptions.

Consumers have unlimited music at their fingertips

With this amount of supply, they are overwhelmed and not sure what to listen to

There is no way to easily find music. Almost all discovery is social and person-to-person

Our solutions was to provide a music search engine. All existing music search engines then (and today) are based on song title and artist name. So, if you search for “dance” you’ll get Steve Miller’s “Dance Dance Dance” which isn’t actually a dance song.

So, how were we going to do this? We were going to capture demographic, play counts, and tag data from users from an iTunes plugin. Then with that data, we’d allow people to search for music. You do a search like “What is the most played song tagged ‘dance’ by 24 year olds?” and we’d display the results. It was pretty damn cool. You could find lots of good music and really see the different music being played by different groups.

We launch in the fall of 2006 and we were excited to see what happened. Ultimately, like many startups, we thought it was cooler than everyone else. We got thousands of users but none of them stuck or were passionate about it. Why? There was one problem – the users wanted to play the songs that we delivered. We just listed the songs and provided a 30-second preview. That wasn’t even close to being enough.

You could search for Music, Tags or People using a variety of parameters

Back in 2006, you couldn’t easily license full tracks of music to be played in the browser. There were a few companies (like Muse) who had 30-sec clips but nobody had full tracks. That’s what people wanted. Eventually we gave it to them, but that’s a later post.

Ultimately, it was a disappointing launch and our investors started to lose faith in us and our vision. I think we were victims of not thinking large enough. We set out to solve a problem, but that problem wasn’t big enough. Providing a good music search was cool, but what people wanted was a more complete solution. We were a bit naive.

Seven months into the Qloud process we secured financing from Steve Case’s fund called Revolution. We were psyched and pushed ahead on the product.

A couple of cool things happened with this such as we got to work in Revolution’s office. The office was right in Dupont Circle (walkable for me) and was really beautiful. Super pimped out. We worked on the same floor as Case and the Revolution team. Other people on that floor were folks running Club Med, Fannie Mae, and Carly Fiorina who had just left HP.

We had one big office in Revolution

I thought at the time that signing on a big name like Steve Case would help in our product adoption and marketing (“New Music Service from Steve Case!”), but it didn’t work that way at all. We weren’t allowed to use his name as PR. Similar to how VC’s don’t want to invest/help until you show traction and growth, Revolution didn’t want to associate themselves with us until we had some success. It’s funny how that works. Only once you’re loved will others express their love of you.

Tige would regularly come in and chat

All of that being said, we did get lots of help from him and his firm (special shout out to Tige Savage and David Hall). Prior to working directly with Case, Toby and I were always wondering how much of his success and AOL’s was due to the rise of the Internet, luck and other factors. After working with him over the 18 months on Qloud, we will both testify to the fact that Steve is the real deal. He’s awesome at product positioning and messaging. He gets technology and product and marketing on a level that most people don’t. He also works his ass off. He loves it and would send us emails late on Friday and Saturday nights. He’s not coasting. He was extremely helpful for us and I consider us very fortunate and lucky to have been able to work with him.

One way he helped was bringing together a great board. With Steve on the board, we were able to attract other people who both liked what we were doing and wanted to work with Revolution. We drew up a list of who were the ideal candidates to get. We thought that it’d be good to get one or two. Well, we got them all.

It was an amazing group. They were:

Steve Case

Jim Bankoff, Qloid Chairman, former President of Netscape, now CEO of Vox Media

They had some great insights into what the music industry wanted. I also think that they were responsible for raising our ambition. They weren’t interested in a lightly-used tool. They wanted a product that impacted the market. It was great to get to know all of them and I definitely appreciated their insight and patience with us as we figured it out.

Looking back on that experience, I’ve definitely learned how important a Board can be. We’ve worked hard at Kapost to surround ourselves with industry veterans who can actually help. I didn’t know what to expect when we took investment with Case, but I did learn a ton and it’s very much responsible for our favorable outcome.

Once we started Qloud, we started building the product and also started fundraising. From day one, looking at our finances, we knew that we had 6 months to get the company to a place where we could raise outside capital. Not only did we need to get the product built and working but we needed to hone our pitch. We came up with what we thought was a compelling vision and set out to talk to investors.

Our pitch was that what we learned at Ruckus was that music discovery was a huge problem. Talking to students it was clear that all discovery was word-of-mouth. Qloud was going to be a way to allow people to find new music without having to ask your friend down the hall. We were going to do that in 2 ways:

we would offer a music search engine where you could search by tags and by demographic. For instance, i want all the music tagged “happy” that is being listened to the most by men age 18-20 who live in Los Angeles. This would return a list of songs that you could then sample.

we would allow people to tag music inside their iTunes. By creating a tag cloud, we would enable on-demand playlists for “happy” or “summer” or “breakup” inside the player. This tagging and information from the iTunes would power the search capability provided in step 1.

Music was a super hot category back then. The iPod and iTunes were one of the first real mainstream technology hits. As a result, there was a lot of attention about how to integrate and capitalize on that momentum.

Tagging and the concept of Web 2.0 was also super hot. The use of tagging in Flickr and del.icio.us made people think that it’d be big and defining convention of the web. It’s interesting to see that tagging has survived as hashtags today.

Find -> Purchase -> Play -> Find More —- in this lifecycle you had iTunes and Amazon CD’s for purchasing, the iPod/iTunes for playing. The only place available in the music ecosystem for a new service was the discovery place. This is still largely true and part of the reason Pandora and internet radio is so popular.

We listened this Al Pacino speech a lot before our meetings. It’s great at getting you pumped up.

We hit all the local investors in DC and then went to San Francisco and hit up all the investors there. A few thoughts about that experience:

DC Investors – they all seemed to have made their money off of wireless and telecom. There wasn’t really a good VC for consumer tech. Novak Biddle was the best we had. As a team, we had no track record other than working at AOL and then working at Ruckus but we were still able to get meetings somehow. The local Angel network was totally useless. It was as if they had never ever used the internet. The AOL network was large but not willing to angel fund startups. It’s nothing like it is in the valley. It’s also nothing like it is today. Being an entrepreneur wasn’t trendy or popular and you almost never saw other startups.

SF Investors – These meetings were interesting. We frequently got asked whether we’re moving out there. I think the general reaction was that it was a smart idea for a service but not a big money maker. They were right.

Steve Case – we were able to get a meeting with him and he brought his son, Everett, who was in then still in high school. They were probably the most informed and intelligent investors we talked to. They got the music space. They got web 2.0 and understood what we were doing. Thankfully Everett liked what we were doing too.

Everett went on to become the best intern we’ve ever had

By the end of our process we didn’t have too many offers. We had strong interest at Columbia Capital (thank you Michael Avon) and a term sheet from Steve Case’s Revolution firm. Our term sheet from Case was interesting. It was a tranche investment. It gave us $200k, then the commitment to invest $500k more once we launched, and they then had the right to invest another $1 million at a set valuation at their discretion. It wasn’t great. But we didn’t have another option so we took it. For better or worse, we were now in bed with Revolution. There’s another blog post about what happened when this all fell apart.

Looking back I’m not sure i would have done anything different. We didn’t have a product, but we believed in our direction. I think we could have dreamed bigger and been more ambitious, but at that time we didn’t necessarily know how to execute on a bigger vision. We could only pitch was we thought we could do.

I also got a better sense of the valley and those VC’s. They want bigger stories and ambitious products and it’s hard to pitch something like that when you’re just getting started. It’s rare the startup that starts with it’s 5-year old product in mind. Most people get success and build from there. While that’s practical, it’s not sexy to investors. They want to see a way for your product to be very successful and it’s your responsibility to show them. We were good at finding the marketing opportunity but not necessarily finding the killer product to seize it.

PS: People often say that you should really vet the investor when you take money. In this instance and also with Kapost we didn’t have many options for our first round of funding. We had to take the only offer on the table. In both cases it worked out great. You have to hustle and only if you have options can you doing any choosing. This is one of my main takeaways: you’re only as good as your options. You can dream all you want, but at the end of the day you have the take the paths available.

This is the first of some posts about the story of Qloud. It’s now been over 8 years so I should start sharing the stories. This first post is about how Toby and I made the leap to quick our jobs and start Qloud.

Leaving Ruckus

Ruckus, a music startup, was failing as a startup. Mostly because music subscriptions weren’t something that University students wanted. They wanted music for their iPod. We were giving them free music that didn’t work with their iPod. So, it was time for a pivot as a business. Toby and I did some research and found that music discovery was a big missing element in these student’s lives. With unlimited music, they didn’t know what to download. They couldn’t think of anything. So, we wanted to give that to them. And we wanted to do it on our own. The fact that we came up with this idea while at Ruckus led to them trying to sue us later, but that’s another blog post.

I had started a company in college (HanoverDelivers.com) but i was a student then and starting it carried no risk. I was now a 29-years old and leaving Ruckus meant leaving a good salary and a good job in a VC-backed startup. I debated it for a while. Ultimately, I ended jumping because it was a challenge that I wanted to take on. Naively, it seemed like fun.

The Basement

So, I jumped. Toby and I started Qloud on Jan 1, 2006. We had no office, no revenue and no product. I had to reduce my expenses so I sub-letted my apartment and moved into Toby’s basement.

Here's our basement office

Toby lived in the ‘burbs and had two young kids (age 3 and 5). Every day, I would wake up early, work all day in the basement with Toby, come up for dinner with the entire family, play around for a little while and then retire to the basement to read, work more or just sleep. I quickly became uncle Mike to the girls. It was a really enjoyable time even though I was single and lacked any good dating prospects.

Evie and Lucy in May 2006

We started right away. We built some wireframes, did a deck (that’s what AOL taught us to do) and hired a few Romanian developers (Luci, Sergiu and Mitza). One thing I noticed right away once we were focused on our new company is that I never, ever, thought that I should have stayed at Ruckus longer. If you ask anyone who has quit their job and started a company they never will say that they left too early.

I also am grateful that I was single and in my twenties. I had no expenses. I had no expectations of money. I could take major risks in my life. I could focus all my energy on the company. I think about my life now – with wife, kids, house, etc. – and while I’m much better at the startup game, I’m less likely to take risks like that. My advice to anyone who is thinking of starting a company is to do it as soon as you can. You won’t learn what it’s like without doing it. You just won’t. So start as soon as you can.

The 2 years from 2006 to 2008 Toby and I built a company called Qloud from nothing to over 20 million monthly users. Those years were some of the craziest years I’ve ever had both professionally and personally. I’ve broken the time into these stories.

We had a big addition to the Lewis family last week. On 1/1/2015 we welcomed Sasha Linda Lewis to the family. She’s already changed our world quite a bit.

When we had Hunter in 2012 I published a blog post about the birth. It was a play-by-play of the entire day. At the time I thought it’d be a fun little look at the event but over the years Diane and I found ourselves referring to it more than we had thought we would. We found ourselves getting the time and events all wrong and were thankful that it was actually posted somewhere. Also, we heard that others found it useful to hear how things actually go once you’re at the hospital. Because of that, i’m posting again what actually happened at the hospital last week. Enjoy…

7:05 – I woke up. We had the Kesners over for a New Years celebration. Given that Diane could pop at any moment, we didn’t do much boozing at all. In fact we were all in bed by 11pm. Yep, we’re old. Waking up at 7am, i checked the monitor and saw that Hunter was still sleeping, but leaning over to Diane i found out that she had been having contractions from 4-6am but nothing in the past hour. There was a little bleeding so Diane called the doctor and she told her to come on in to the hospital to get it checked out.

7:45 – Luckily Jules, Abbie and Cece were at our house so they could hold down the fort and watch Hunter while Diane and i got going to the hospital.

8:30-9:05 – Got to hospital and get into our room which is lovely. Diane is having more contractions but nothing that feels too major.

9:33 – Diane is now strapped in to some monitors and just plowing through contractions. Things seem to be escalating.

9:45 – The doctor (Dr. Diane Christopher) took a look at Diane and found her to still be at 4cm dilated, which is what she was 3 days ago. Apparently, nothing is really happening. The doctor said she’ll be back in 2 hours to check again. Mike’s got breakfast. Diane tried to nap.

11:45 – Diane is still at 4cm. They are trying to kick us out but we convince them to check again in 2 hours. We’re going to go walk around to try to kick this baby off. Also, Lizzie T. has come up from Castle Rock is now on Hunter duty. We’re super happy to have her on the case.

Side note: we were wondering why they are trying to kick us out. They suggest we go home because they think of the delivery like an ER room and only really want you in it if you are in active labor or having complications. If you’re dilation isn’t moving then you’re not considered in labor and they don’t want you there.

1:45 – The doctor came in to check Diane out again. Nothing had changed. Doh. Even though there are more contractions and they are more intense, we are still at 4cm. They gave us three options: (a) take some petocin which is a hormone that will guarantee to speed up contractions and induce labor; (b) go home or some place else and wait for it to speed up; (c) have them break her water. We choose option (d) – to wait an hour and then re-assess as we don’t want to go but we don’t want to artificially do anything.

3:15 – they are back and… We’re still at 4cm! Crappers. We now have a choice of:

Leave and wait for action to start

Get a petocin drip which will accelerate the contractions and induce labor

Break the water which should induce labor

We don’t really know what to do.

3:45-4:30 – Diane showers and we mull it over. Mike calls Jonas and Emily as she’s a kickass OB in Philly. After a good chat with Jonas about what we should do, we decide to break the water. We’ll see how that goes. If it doesn’t kick start labor then we’ll fall back to petocin. Basically we don’t want to leave as we’re afraid it’ll happen fast and we won’t make it back to the hospital.

5:00 – Drawing blood, signing forms and stuff for epidural.

5:15 – Doctor breaks water. Note: we were at 6cm when broke. We also called for epidural because no matter what we want that in.

6:00 – lots of full body shakes happening. The anxiety and the contractions themselves are making everything intense. Diane is not feeling good. We are in a dark and not happy place. Shit is going down.

6:10 – They put in the epidural in.

6:40 – Things are a bit calmer. Contractions are still happening but much less pain. The nurse checks for dilation and discovers that there is no cervix – i.e. we are fully ready. This could be happening fast. Going to get the doctor

6:45 – Baby is coming…starting to push

7:10 – still pushing

7:25 – still pushing. We discovered that Diane’s belly button has a mind of its own during this whole process

I had always assumed that the print/book industry was really struggling – similar to the music industry. However, Bezos’s quote of, “…the facts are wrong. Publishers are having unparalleled profitability, and the book industry is in better shape than it ever has been, and it’s because of e-books” is interesting.

It’s also interesting that they take such a long-term view for the Kindle. As Bezos states, “The vision for Kindle is every book, every imprint, in any language, all available in 60 seconds.” That’s quite a mission. They are definitely doing really well so far.

The Amazon Phone

He admits that it’s a flop but contends that it’s just the start of them being in that business. He states, “The Kindle is now on its seventh generation. The Kindle Voyage, the new premium product, is just completely killer. Fire TV, Fire TV Stick — we’re having trouble building enough. Amazon Echo, which we just launched. So there’s a lot of activity going on in our device business. With the phone, I just ask you to stay tuned.”

I wonder how many times they plan on iterating on the phone. He talks about bold bets with things like Kindle, AWS and third-party resellers, but building a phone and competing against Apple, Android (they aren’t using core Android), Samsung and others is entirely different. While audacious, i’m not sure I see how they can differentiate.

Drones

He did an interview with “60 Minutes” and showcased their drone delivery system. It was awesome. He was asked about it here. As you’d expect, he thinks the main thing holding it back is the regulatory issues, saying, “The most interesting part of this is the autopilot and the guidance and control and the machine vision systems that make it all work. As for when, though, that is very difficult to predict. I’d bet you the ratio of lawyers to engineers on the primary team is probably the highest at Amazon.“

I think it’s the same for self-driving cars (I have a bet they’ll be here by 2023). It totally works right now but the world is just not ready for it. There are so many unanswered questions, such as: if someone gets killed or severely injured by a self-driving car, who’s liable? Is it the person who bought the car, the company that built the car? Is there some level of insurance that you can get?

First, i was stuck in traffic for about 2 hours trying to get from Oakland airport to SF city. The Bay Bridge was backed up and we just sat for hours. Finally, when the traffic parted, i looked to my left and saw a rainbow and knew that everything going forward would be alright:

After hitting the city, i cruised down to Palo Alto area and saw an interesting sight. It was my first sighting of the new BMW i3. The i3 is the Bavarian automaker’s first fully electric vehicle available to buy. I thought it was fitting that i saw the electric car surrounded by the biggest polluting trucks i’ve ever seen. Check it:

I also had a great time jamming out to new favorite tune. It’s Bruno Mars’s new song which just jams. I saw it on SNL this weekend and was blown away. Check it out:

Anyway, it was a successful trip to the bay area although I’m happy to be headed back to Colorado. Given the Jan. 3 due date of baby #2, i expect i’ll be taking a little hiatus from traveling for a while.

This past Dreamforce conference I saw that there was a session being led by Hadi Patrovi. I was intrigued as my former company, Qloud, competed directly with the company iLike were Patrovi was CEO. We talked once briefly about merging the two companies, but ultimately nothing became of it. We sold to BuzzMedia for $8million and they sold to MySpace for $16m. Both products were then quickly shut down. Oh well, it’s all water under the bridge.

So, i wanted to see what Hadi was up to. Man was I in for a treat. Hadi is the founder of Code.org which is doing some remarkable stuff. Code.org is a non-profit dedicated to expanding participation in computer science by making it available in more schools. Their vision is that every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn computer science and it should be part of the core curriculum in education, alongside other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses, such as biology, physics, chemistry and algebra. I totally agree.

At Kapost we are constantly on the lookout for great engineers. Always. We don’t close those job recs. We are always looking. This is important because in the USA the number of people qualified for the jobs (demand) far outweighs the supply.

Programming jobs are growing at 2X the national average. But, we also have an unemployment problem and we’re not doing anything to address these two things.

Even worse, in college only 2.4% of college students are graduating with a Computer Science degree – and that number is SHRINKING. In high school it’s also lame as 9 out of 10 high schools don’t even offer a programming class and in 25 of the 50 states computer science can’t count towards a high school graduation math or science requirements.

So, i’m happy they exist and apparently so is the rest of the country. In their launch late last year they made quite a splash. Most companies and websites launch with a little fanfare and get an initial bump of users. On their launch day they had:

The President of the US, Obama, give a press announcement about it and Code.org’s “hour of code” happening that day

All the major morning shows in the USA talk about the “hour of code”

The pushed it hard enough so that 1 in 5 US students had tried the “hour of code”

Became the fastest website in the world to get to 15 million users.

I’m really happy for the start that it’s received and I think it’s a great cause for us to tackle in America as we prepare for the future. Personally, I had zero exposure to programming in high school. I took an intro class in college and loved it. That led to another class and before I knew it i was majoring in CS. That led to a career in technology and I couldn’t be happier. It’d be a shame if others couldn’t get that chance.

The season starts tonight for the Timberwolves. As part of that, this will be a defining year for Ricky Rubio.

His contract is up at the end of the year and he has already rejected a 4 year $48m offer. For the other positions they have:

Center: Pekovic and Deng – both above average centers in the league

PF: Thad Young – an above average PF in the league

SF: Andrew Wiggins – predicted to be the next Tracy McGrady

SG: Kevin Martin – pretty good

Ricky is supposedly the leader of that group. Looking at that lineup, if they don’t do well, it’s probably his fault and his inability to impact games. If they do well, it’s likely because he has a great season. As Rubio goes, so do the Wolves.

They way I figure this goes is one of two directions:

Direction ONE: the Wolves do well, i.e. approach 35 wins and compete for a playoff spot. In this scenario, I think they pony up and pay Rubio more money

Direction TWO: the Wolves are a lottery team. In this scenario, they don’t resign Ricky and draft a point guard in the lottery.

I’m excited for the NBA season to start. On Monday night the Twolves had their first pre-season game and it looks like Andrew Wiggins could be the real deal. A summary of his performance from the blog post:

Andrew Wiggins. There is obviously a player here. He led the team in minutes (32) and points (18). He took some poor 20 footers and wound up shooting 4-11 overall, but got to the line 10 times and made both of his threes. He also blocked 3 shots and grabbed 3 offensive boards. There is obviously stuff to work on, including getting stronger around the rim and ball handling, but there was a lot to like.

There’s also a good YouTube video of his action here:

As we do every year, we place a friendly bet in the office for the season. This year it’s between Niraj and Ian. Here is how our teams are projected to do:

Timberwolves: Projected 26.5 games won

Nuggets: Projected 35.5 games won

Pistons: Projected 35.5 games won

The bet we’re making with each other is whichever teams performs the worst relative to their projected win count, the loser buys the winners a lunch of their choice at Rio Grande. Now, let’s get it started!

I listened to the announcement last week and have a lot of thoughts on the upcoming iPhone.

Apple’s launch event came, and delivered (mostly) what had been leaked and/or expected: a larger iPhone & a phablet, payments and a smart watch. The phones are mostly predictable: the customer is always right, and the customer has decided to optimise for pocket size and experience over thumb size (the changes in iOS7 & iOS8 have made it possible to do this, incidentally).

Why did they make it bigger?

Basically, Apple dominates the high end of the phone market. They like it that way. To date, there has been a few high-end Android phones eating away at their sales (mostly Samsung phones). There are currently six reason people buy these phones (taken from Benedicts’s Blog):

Their operator subsidies an Android but not an iPhone – this has now ended, with Apple adding distribution with all the last significant hold-outs (Sprint, DoCoMo, China Mobile)

They don’t particularly care what phone they get and the salesman was on more commission to sell Androids or, more probably, Samsungs that day (and iPhones the next, of course)

They have a dislike of Apple per se – this is hard to quantify but probably pretty small, and balanced by people with a dislike of Google

They are heavily bought into the Google ecosystem

They like the customizations that are possible with Android and that have not been possible with iOS until (to a much increased extent) iOS8 (more broadly, once could characterize this as ‘personal taste’)

They want a larger screen.

The first has largely gone, the second is of little value to an ecosystem player and nets out at zero (i.e. Apple gains as many indifferent users as it loses) and the third is small. Apple has now addressed the fifth and sixth. That is, with the iPhone 6 and iOS8, Apple has done its best to close off all the reasons to buy high-end Android beyond simple personal preference. As Benedict Evans states, “You can get a bigger screen, you can change the keyboard, you can put widgets on the notification panel (if you insist) and so on. Pretty much all the external reasons to choose Android are addressed – what remains is personal taste.”

What’s the deal with ApplePay?

A lot of people are saying “they are going to make a ton of money with ApplePay!” and “They are going to crush PayPal!” – both are not even close to true. If you look at what they are actually doing here, it’s not to take on banks, credit cards or any actual payment system. They are taking on the wallet. If you look at what they did with music – they didn’t put Universal Music out of business, they didn’t come up with a better way to be a label, they just crushed the music store (like Tower Records). It’s the same here. You still need a credit card. You still need a bank to issue thecard. You just don’t have to pull it out or even have it when buying something.

I just pre-ordered my new iPhone 6 (not the Plus) to get it on Friday. What about you? You buying one?

Kapost is still expanding rapidly. A year ago we were ~20 people and now we’re ~60. That’s a lot of new faces and we’ve done a lot of hiring. (Blog post about Kapost expansion) Thinking about our our expansion brought me to how we view culture. Some thoughts on that…

Culture is Important

We have a culture doc that is on the web (below). It gets a lot of views (over 2k). It’s also important as it’s how we describe working at Kapost. We actually thought a lot about it.

I’ve been asking a lot of people who have scaled companies what they would do differently and what’s worked for them. They repeatedly talk about culture. This is what keeps it all together for them. As David Cummings (Founder of Pardot) says,

Yes, the people are the most important part, but culture is reflected in the core values, processes, and the way the company chooses to act.

Basically, it’s super important. I’ve also been thinking about what culture actually means. More and more to me it means just how stuff gets done. How do conversations go, how fast are decisions made, how honest should people be? That is all defined by the culture. It takes a while for people to realize. I’d say that at Kapost, people have described our culture as super transparent, high accountability, and very fast. I think that’s true. I think it’ll change over time but that’s how it’s been for the past few years.

Vibe vs. Values

Brad Feld had a post that described the difference between Vibe and Values. It says how the music in your office, the dress code, the food in the office is all “vibe” and the vibe can change in a company and are defined by employees. The values are “the guiding principles or a code-of-conduct upon which a company was founded and which it operates on a daily basis” and are defined by the company. Things like “don’t be evil” at Google. They are two different things and we should differentiate between the two.

The Alliance

This is a business book I read this summer when it came out. It’s by Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn. It’s very interesting and something we talk about a lot at Kapost. The idea is that employees are no longer hired for their entire career and because of that you should treat them as though they will someday leave your company. Each employee is coming aboard for a “tour of duty” and you should actively define that tour, being explicit about what the employee will do for the company and what the company will do for the employee. It more accurate reflects how people treat a job. It also allows for honest conversations about what employees and employers want. It’s a great framework and I recommend you check it out.

What if you walked around the company you worked at and went to someone and asked, “What would it take tomorrow to get you fired?”

I just saw that question asked in this awesome video by Jerry Colonna:

Chances are people don’t really know what it takes to get fired. What he argues is that if people don’t really know what it takes to get fired, then they don’t really know if they are actually doing a good job. Putting some transparency around what defines success and failure can take a lot of stress out of people’s time at work.

Niraj and I just made a bet. The Lions are projected to win 9 games this season and the Vikings are projected to win 6. We have a bet to see who wins more and he is spotting me 3 wins. The loser buys the winner some football paraphernalia (max price $30)

Bring it on!

On a related note, I really want a website to exist that allows you to enter in a bet, a prize for the winner and a date for it to be resolved and then this app notifies you when that date comes. I have so many little bets placed but I need something to keep track of them. Somebody please build this.

This past Monday Hupspot released their official S-1 which is the information released for a company when they are about to IPO.

I’ve read a lot about this information and wanted to jot down some of the more interesting pieces:

Founded in June 2006 in Cambridge MA, they coined the term “inbound marketing.” They did more than coin it, they lived. They wrote the books, built an influential blog and practiced what they preach. Nowadays you hear “inbound marketing” all the time. Here’s to them for coining a term that an entire industry adopts. (ChiefMartec talks about this more here)

In their S-1, they list as one major risk factor as is the inability of customers to create content to make blogging, social media, and inbound marketing in general worthwhile. This is true for our customers as well. If nobody is creating content, then many of your marketing efforts fail (email marketing, social, inbound, etc.)

The letter from the founders about their beginnings is pretty cool. It talks about how their strategy coalesced around:

We started HubSpot with one simple goal: make it easier to get going with inbound, so businesses could get growing. One platform to learn. One password to remember. One bill to pay. And, one phone number to call. One integrated system, designed from the ground up to transform how organizations market and sell.

The letter also talks about their culture as being vital to attracting great employees. We are seeing that at Kapost as well. They put it well, saying,

To achieve our vision of transforming how organizations market and sell, we had to attract and retain the best people in the world. HubSpot’s culture is predicated on radical transparency, individual autonomy and enlightened empathy. We codified and publicly shared our approach to this different kind of workplace in HubSpot’s Culture Code slide deck. It has been viewed over a million times, shared on social media thousands of times, and received remarkable acclaim.

Marketing technology is a crowded space. It’s not often that a company achieves enough scale to IPO, so congrats to that team. I met one of the founders a few years ago at Techstar’s FounderCon and we had their CMO Mike Volpi to our event last year and both of them were incredible nice and helpful.

Overall, I expect this IPO to work out well. They have a great team and the market is only growing. They used to have a big retention problem, but they seemed to have that under control now and they are moving up-market and capturing more and more money. I think they’ll do great.

I read a good post by Jason Lemkin (former CEO of EchoSign, now partner at Storm Ventures) about hiring VP’s in your company and he had the following passage which totally resonated with me:

SaaS is going into battle together every day. Wining that next customer. Saving that big deal. Building that crazy feature. Every day, there’s a new drama.

It’s truly a team effort. The VP of Sales opens and closes. The VP Marketing feeds the machine. The VP of Customer Success keeps it running and adds fuel to the fire. The VP Product makes sure the 1,000+ customers get what they need, as impossible as that is. And the VP Engineering’s job is to make a business process 10x better than it ever was before, just using computers. This is teamwork. And it’s really not that silo’d at all. You’re all working on different parts of the same puzzle — Customers.

Where I don’t see true teamwork, I almost always see eventual failure. Or at least, underperformance.

I’m running the product ship and I feel really thankful that we have a great team lined up right now of Toby, Patrick, Riley and Nader.

I remember my sophomore year in high school where I decide for a New Year’s Resolution to give up soda (or as I called it then, “pop”) as I thought i was becoming a bit too addicted to caffeine. After a few days of withdrawal, I was fine. I’ve never looked back. Since 1993, I’ve been off the juice. Other than a special Captain and Coke and super-rare RedBull and Vodka, I’m free of caffeine these days.

I really enjoy it. It keeps me balanced. I have noticed that i’m more likely to do a run or cardio activity in the morning to get going as it’s really the only way I know to get my brain cruising.

I’ve also noticed that in the rare occasion when i do have some caffeine, man does it hit me. I go crazy. I’ve also noticed that if i mix lots of liquor and caffeine, i’m sometimes sleepwalk – leading to some really weird stories. That’s another blog post.

While i’m on the topic, a huge pet-peeve of mine is that lack of drinks available that are both diet AND caffeine free. It’s usually either-or. You have Sprite, 7Up and some root beers that are caffeine-free, and then you have Diet Coke, Diet Dr. Pepper and such. You can’t have both for some reason. That really bothers me.

During the 1970s, the average person doubled the amount of soda they drank; by the 1980s it had overtaken tap water. In 1998, Americans were downing 56 gallons of the stuff every year—that’s 1.3 oil barrels’ worth of soda for every person in the country.

Since 2000, soft-drink sales stabilized for a few years; in 2005 they started dropping, and they haven’t stopped. Americans are now drinking about 450 cans of soda a year, roughly the same amount they did in 1986.

For Coke this is a problem. Soda makes up 74% of its business worldwide and about 68% in the U.S. Sales of Coca-Cola’s carbonated sodas fell 2% in the U.S. last year, the ninth straight year of decline. Coca-Cola made $46.8 billion last year, down from $48 billion in 2012.

Diet Coke tumbled especially hard, dropping 7 percent, almost entirely the result of the growing unpopularity of aspartame amid persistent rumors that it’s a health risk.

Today, Coca-Cola has 130,600 employees and makes 500 different beverages that people around the world drink 2 billion servings of every day.

A quarter of all carbonated beverages consumed globally are made by Coke; Pepsi is at 11%.

By 1999, according to the CDC, a fifth of all U.S. adults were obese; today that number is 35%. Obesity rates among children have tripled since the 1970s.

Coca-Cola now knows that 40 percent of the drinks customers buy have an added flavor and that people over 34 drink mostly caffeine-free Coke in the afternoon.

The videos and advertisements for sports flowing through the internets these days have been great. Wanted to capture and share a few for y’all:

Recently, there was a great new ad lauding Derek Jeter in the final year of his career (although it should be noted that Joe Mauer has posted better stats at age 31 than Jeter did at at 31)

Related to that, there’s a send-up of the above ad by Funny Or Die, not lauding Alex Rodriguez:

For the Timberwolves, I’m all in favor of trading Kevin Love for Wiggins to the Cavaliers. Speaking of the Cavs, there’s a great mock video of Lebron and his “Coming Home” campaign mashed up with Dumb and Dumber.

Finally, this is over a month old, but the Beats ad for the World Cup was definitely the best one of the summer. It came out right before the Cup started and got me incredibly pumped for it. A great ad.

I recently listened to a great commencement speech by Robert Krulwich about the power of storytelling and it made me think about the power of narrative and stories in my business.

See, I work in content marketing. To most people, that’s a dull phrase that doesn’t mean anything. But to me, content marketing is the power of businesses using stories and entertainment and ideas to connect with their customers. It’s using these stories instead of banner ads, popup ads, billboards and other branding tactics that try to distract and interrupt you. It’s a powerful change in the marketing and sales landscape.

The speech talked about two gentleman who told stories. The first is sir Isaac Newton. Back in the day Newton was asked why he made his famous book about gravity and laws of motion so hard to read, he replied that that he considered writing a popular version that average people might understand but he wanted “To avoid being baited by little smaterrers in mathematics.” Newton intentionally wrote a book in dense scholarly Latin that contained lots of math so that only serious scholars could follow. In other words, Isaac newton didn’t care if he was understood by average folks. He did not believe in the power of storytelling.

The second was the story of Galileo. He, unlike Newton, had a flair for narrative. He wanted to tell people what was on his mind. In his famous book, ‘The Dialogues‘ about the sun being the center of the solar system, he didn’t write it in Latin. He wrote it Italian for a mass audience. The writing was gorgeous and poetic and funny. It was a running conversation between good friends who spend four days together in Venice. Their argument is between whether the earth is the center of the solar system or is it the sun. He has little pictures throughout the book and short chapters so it’s easy to read. There are numbers in the book and apparently if you skip them, you don’t miss that much. Because it was so easy to read and became such a hit he was actually sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. His stories had that much power.

I see businesses every day who want to connect to buyers and impact their lives. Not all businesses realize it yet, but their stories are competing every second with everything else on the web. If you’re selling cars, you’re competing with John Oliver, Facebook and hamsters eating burritos for attention and time, and the only way you can attain it is to make your content compelling and give your potential buyers a reason to read, follow and market to you.

Their are some companies that have harnessed their inner Galileo and told some great stories that are useful, and they have buyers eating out of they palms. That’s the way it works.

Looking at this photo and seeing how far we’ve come makes me think back on what’s different now:

More Great People: We’ve grown from 12 people a year ago to over 50, and have added some amazing people to our team. From Riley to Jace to Patrick, the number of quality folks roaming our office is incredible. Our engineering and product team is full of A-players. Our marketing team is full of innovators. Our sales team is full of killers. This has been the biggest and best change.

Great Leadership: My co-founder Toby has really become a great leader and has a real knack at being able to point the ship and get all groups working towards a common goal. Similarly, my other partner, Nader, is a joy to work with as well. Having someone who can ensure that the Kapost technology is top notch and moving in the right direction and do it in such an effortless way is awesome. They both aren’t afraid to challenge the team, to hold true to their convictions, and to do what’s right.

Good Discussions: We also had a board meeting last week where we went through all the areas of our business and how they’re doing. We’ve recently expanded our board to include Paul Bell and Alex Shootman and as a result these sessions generate some great discussions about how we attack the market and grow faster.

More Specialized: 18 months ago we were only 12 people. At that time people wore lots of hats. At the time, I ran the product group, ran HR, ran account management and participated in sales. Now that we have more people, we can afford to have specialists who are top in their field. As a result, all of us are going deeper in our areas. It’s nice to be able to focus, but it’s quite a difference from when I was able to see and hear and participate in many other parts of the business.

More of more and more. There are lots of new things. More dogs. More bikes. More GIF’s. More biking rides up Sunshine. More meetings and more meetings. There are challenges, but that’s why we do it and why it’s fun. We’ve grown a lot and I’m enjoying it immensely.

What a great game yesterday. After Jozy went down, the US was bad. Really bad, but escaped with 3 points. Without the 3 points, the tournament is basically over for them.

John Brooks scored, soccer fans roared, and minutes later, US 2, Ghana 1 was in the books as a great win. I was sure that Brooks was going to be a disaster, but instead, Brooks, only 21, is a hero. Nicely done.

Some interesting tidbits from the game:

Here’s a video of a collection of videos from around the world of soccer fans celebrating the Brooks header off the foot of Graham Zusi.

A cool video fo the tweet volume before and after the goal

John Brooks found his wikipedia entry edited last night right after the game. Seems a big more accurate now:

Read an article this weekend about Spotify in Wired. It now has 10 million subscribers paying $10 a month. Because they have to pay 70% of each track’s revenue back to the labels, that doesn’t leave much margin left. Thus, they are still plowing through cash. They’ve spent over $200 million dollars to date. In 2011 reported a loss of 59 million (24% of revenue 245mm) and 2012 had loss of $72 million (13% of 558mm).

I’ve always thought that the music industry is f’ed and if you’re the number 1 streaming provider and you’re not doing well, something’s wrong.

Well the time is cursing by and Hunter is growing up really fast. I thought i’d take another moment to reflect on how things are going. Some thoughts:

Hunter’s Development

Man is he growing. The first year now seemed more about physical development. He was just getting bigger and learning how to use his limbs. Now he seems more about exercising his brain. He’s constantly trying to figure stuff out. How to open jars. How doors work. Why switching a light switch here changes the brightness over there. Lots of stuff like this are all the rage at our house right now. So much so that i have found that if you’re not challenging what he knows, he gets bored quickly and then things spiral out of control. He’s a high bandwidth kid. I have no idea if this is unusual or not.

Because this is now the norm, he’s much more of a little person these days. He has expressions and words and a personality. He’s definitely a human and, to me, he’s getting cuter and cuter.

The Tradeoff

I recently heard Shondra Rhimes’ Dartmouth commencement address where she talks about how she’s both a working woman and a mother and how she juggles it all. Her answer: she doesn’t. I know how she feels. Prior to Hunter, I would work pretty late almost every night. Now I like to see Hunter before he goes to sleep. There’s a struggle between being doing well at work and seeing my family, and I don’t think there’s a good answer. Ultimately, I’ll always be failing at one of them. I’m having to get used to that fact. It’s quite a change.

Shondra says it much better than I:

If I am killing it on a Scandal script for work, I’m probably missing bath and story time at home. If I am at home sewing my kids’ Halloween costumes, I am probably blowing off a script I was supposed to rewrite. If I’m accepting a prestigious award, I’m missing my baby’s first swim lesson. If I am at my daughter’s debut in her school musical, I am missing Sandra Oh’s last scene ever being filmed at Grey’s Anatomy.

If I am succeeding at one, I am inevitably failing at the other. That is the trade off. That is the Faustian bargain one makes with the devil that comes with being a powerful working woman who is also a powerful mother. You never feel one hundred percent okay, you never get your sea legs, you are always a little nauseous. Something is always lost.

Old People

I’m constantly amazed how similar babies are to old people. The drooling, the babbling, the lack of coordination. Just very very similar. Circle of life.

Default State of Happiness

When Hunter wakes up in the morning, he’s smiling. By default, he’s happy. He’s giggling and smiling unless something happens to make him upset. It makes me think that this is the default state for most humans. I often think about this. I wonder that if we have to have something negative happen to us to be in a permanent bad mood. I see people yelling at traffic or walking the street with a frown on their face. They weren’t born that way. Something has happened. When i’m feeling upset or sad, I try to remember that. It’s the world interacting with me that got me there. It’s not how I am by default. I like that thought.

I was chatting the other day about why Snapchat is so popular. Most people think it’s because of sexting and the fact that the photos disappear, but i think it’s more than that. I recently came across a speech by the Snapchat founder (Evan Spiegel) and thought it was pretty enlightening as to how he sees usage occur.

He talks about how people today don’t want to fully recreate their offline experience online. They want to be online but understand that their online profile isn’t the sum of them. It’s a pretty different view. A highlight of the speech:

Traditional social media required that we live experiences in the offline world, record those experiences, and then post them online to recreate the experience and talk about it. For example, I go on vacation, take a bunch of pictures, come back home, pick the good ones, post them online, and talk about them with my friends.

This traditional social media view of identity is actually quite radical: you are the sum of your published experience. Otherwise known as: pics or it didn’t happen.

Or in the case of Instagram: beautiful pics or it didn’t happen AND you’re not cool.

This notion of a profile made a lot of sense in the binary experience of online and offline. It was designed to recreate who I am online so that people could interact with me even if I wasn’t logged on at that particular moment.

Snapchat relies on Internet Everywhere to provide a totally different experience. Snapchat says that we are not the sum of everything we have said or done or experienced or published – we are the result. We are who we are today, right now.

He then also talks about how when you take the photo away, it’s more about the feeling and not the photo. It’s subtle but powerful difference. He says:

Snapchat discards content to focus on the feeling that content brings to you, not the way that content looks. This is a conservative idea, the natural response to radical transparency that restores integrity and context to conversation.

Snapchat sets expectations around conversation that mirror the expectations we have when we’re talking in-person.

That’s what Snapchat is all about. Talking through content not around it. With friends, not strangers. Identity tied to now, today. Room for growth, emotional risk, expression, mistakes, room for YOU.

I like that concept. And with that it’s clear why people, especially teenagers, would want a more forgiving medium.

I’m a big FourSquare user and i have been since they launched. I think I was one of the original 10k users to sign up for the service. Looking at my profile, i can see that i’ve done over 5700 checkin and am the mayor of over 20 venues. I’m all over it.

I learned a few weeks ago that 4S was going to change up their business. They discovered that there are two distinct personas that use their app: (1) the user who checks in a lot and views where their friends are; (2) the user who uses the app to find places to go and search for tips. They found that they were constantly limiting each personas experience so they could wedge both into the service. They also recognized the rise of “App Constellations” where multiple services such as Facebook, Dropbox and others are producing multiple apps that deep link to each other (read this good Fred Wilson blog post about it). So, they announced that they are splitting their business into two apps: one for the checkin user (like me) called Swarm and another for the venue researcher called Foursquare (which will compete directly with Yelp).

I like this change. Since it happened, i found myself using Swarm a lot and because it didn’t have the other stuff in there, it’s more streamlined and easier to use. They also were able to add a few extra features like “Where are you going to be?” because they have the room. In short, I love the new strategy and like the new app.

Mayors 2.0. We wanted to get back to a fun way to compete with your friends instead of all 50,000,000 people who are on Foursquare. With these new mayorships, if you and a couple friends have been checking in to a place, the person who has been there the most lately gets a crown sticker. So you and your friends can compete for the mayorship of your favorite bar, without having to worry about the guy who is there every. single. day. Mayors 2.0 means that places can have many different mayors, one for each circle of friends, instead of just a single mayor at each place.

I am mayor at 20+ places and found daily enjoyment in that fact. This change is a bummer. I guess it reflects society’s need for everybody to be a winner, which is also stupid. But I understand why they’re doing it, but i also hate it. It’d be nice to have a global mayor.

As a side note: I’ve currently checked in to Illegal Pete’s for 79 consecutive weeks. I feel like that’s some sort of record.

As Kapost grows, I really aspire for us to continually get better and better at what we do. I ran the product group by myself for so long that i’m really excited to have more kickass folks on the team now (Anthony, Niraj, Eric, Jace). With this extra firepower, we are able to do some really cool things and we’ve done some recently.

First, customer development. We’re taking this to another level. We’re talking to customers more and more. We need to. As we get more customers, it’s harder to know if your roadmap is what they want. Also, our product is getting more complex so the feedback has more breadth. We’re off to a great start in 2014. We had a Kapost conference in SF a few weeks ago and Anthony and I flew out there to talk to over 20 customers. We talked about new features coming out and our upcoming redesign. We got some great feedback.

In fact, it worked out so well that we even had one of our customers write an article on Inc.com about how much she loved talking to us. You know you’re doing something right when a customer starts thanking you for listening.

Second, we’re finally putting goals and metrics on product releases. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but we’re actually doing it now. Here’s the deal: when you’re planning a feature or new product, we (the PM’s) attach what success means for that product 8 weeks after release. For one feature it means usage by 50% of customers 8 weeks after release. For another, we had 10 customers asking for it, so we considered it a success if 7 of them using it regularly 8 weeks after release. There’s lots of talk about customer development, prototyping, MVP, and agile methods, but much less about the followup that happens once a product is released.

Our engineering team is evaluated by shipping code, but we’re evaluating our product team by whether or not they are hitting the success metric. This has resulted in some interesting behavior in the product team such as:

when a product is released they are much more inclined to explain it to the sales and customer success team so customers will know about the feature and use it

if a customer asked for a feature, they then make sure that the feature is adopted before moving on and if it’s not adopted, figure out why and fix it.

After a product release, a feature should be adopted and hitting its goals. If it’s not it’s either because the requirements were bad or the implementation is bad. Either way, tracking the adoption is necessary. This rigor is new to Kapost and already is paying dividends. I have another post coming soon about why Mixpanel and Totango are great for tracking.

As Kapost grows (we’re now over 50 people), the teams get bigger and more sophisticated. Lots of founders dread the growth because they no longer can have their hands on everything. For me, i’m loving the growth of the company, the team, and our ability to do more.

I’m sort of a kickstarter junkie. I love buying stuff that is new and on the cutting edge and i like to support people building cool stuff. I often find items on Kickstarter that are ahead of their time and i usally sign up to support them.

However, my last three big purchases from Kickstarter have turned out to be a disappointment. Not so much because of what i received but because of how and when they were delivered. Let me explain

Pebble Watch

Why I was interested – a watch that integrates with my smartphone! All updates come to the watch. I also liked the Runkeeper integration where i don’t have to look at my phone when on a run.

Why I’m disappointed – I like the watch (my review of Pebble Watch) but i ordered this May 2012 and received it over a year later. By the time it hit the market, there were better options such as the Samsung or Sony watch. Ordering it on KS didn’t give me the option of exploring the market nor did it give me a watch before it hit the market. It just locked me into a solution.

Narrative Clip / Memoto

Why I was Interested – I love recording my life. The thought of something taking photos every 30 seconds sounds awesome. I was super into it.

Why I’m Disappointed – Again, it took FOREVER for this. I order November 2012 and received it almost 15 months later. Even worse they kept sending emails about how close they were – even though they weren’t actually close at all.

Veronica Mars Movie

Why I was Interested – I love the show. I was excited there’d be a movie and wanted to support that effort. They’d give me a digital download that i could watch at home instead of going to the theater. That alone was worth the price.

What I was Disappointed – The digital download was only available in this crappy Flixster player which couldn’t, unlike every other movie file i own, couldn’t be played on my television. Thus, i had to rent the movie anyway, essentially making me double-pay for the film. I was happy to do so, but i was still misled. Again i was disappointed.

To sum up, i love Kickstarter and what it does. I think it’s a great company. However, my enthusiasm for backing projects has gone way down. I’ll probably do some more but will likely only do it if i don’t need the product in any specific timeframe and only if my desire to support the project outweighs my desire to actually get the product described.

Saw this from Dixon’s blog over the weekend. It’s a good clip from Steve Jobs in 1995 where he talks about how building great products and thought it was worth a repost.

As the head of Product at Kapost, it really resonates to me as we often start off with a product idea and through months of discussion and design, come out at a different place – one that is always better than where we began. I also like the talk of keeping things out of product. In my opinion, that’s one of the hardest part of design product – trying to intentionally remove or not include parts that customers claim they want.

The Jobs quote:

There’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can’t make electrons do. There are certain things you can’t make plastic do. Or glass do. Or factories do. Or robots do.

Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.

That’s one thing I love about product. You need to understand design, your business, competitive landscape, your customers, technology and how to get things done. It’s one of the more interdisciplinary roles a company has.

My brother-in-law (aka TheBoss) tipped me off to this wonderful app the other day. It’s called PaperKarma and here’s how it works:

Get your mail from the mailbox

Get a bunch of crappy catalogs in the mail – always happens to me for some reason

Load up the PaperKarma app on your phone

Take a picture of the catalog that you don’t want to get any more, marking who it’s addressed to (me or my wife)

Upload it into the app

That’s it

They then will take care of everything that’s needed to cancel the subscription. The amount of paper that’s wasted on sending catalogs to my house is incredible. In the past two months, i’ve used PaperKarma to cancel 28 catalog subscriptions. Some of those were coming every quarter. It’s ridiculous.

An employee recently left Kapost (sad to see you go T) and i was out to lunch with her and she asked some advice. I thought back to two pieces of advice that I was given or things that i have witnessed from successful colleagues. Here’s what popped up:

“90% of Power is Taken not Given”

This is a quote from my old boss Bill Raduchel. Bill loves saying phrases like this to me, and this was one juicy nugget he spat out in 2002 when I was working at AOL. I took it to heart. I was a product manager at the time and aspired t

Bill at the Inn at Little Washington

o have even more responsibility within the company. He noticed that and delivered this great quote. What he meant was that nobody is going to give me extra responsibility. If i want it, i have to go take it and earn it.

That’s what i did. I wanted to run video services within the company. There were lots of people running bits and pieces but nobody was owning it. Instead of waiting for a title and position to be created, i just started acting like i was the defacto video product manager. I had weekly all-hands meetings with the other stakeholders, came up with a product roadmap, and basically acted like the product owner. What happened? Eventually the company realized i was the product owner and rewarded me with that title.

In small companies there are too many things to do. In big companies there are lots of ambiguity, swirl and gray space. In both instances, there’s an opportunity to do what you want. Just be proactive and go do it. In real estate, ownership is 9/10 the law. In startups, doing is 9/10 the position.

Don’t Eat Alone

This is just something i’ve realized. Most of the people we hire at Kapost come from referrals. Most of the opportunities i’ve been given in my career come from contacts of friends of friends. The size and strength (i.e. authenticity) of your network matters in today’s work world and in your career. I’ve seen people (Nick O’Neil) go crazy about this where they actually track in a spreadsheet the people they’ve met and want to keep in touch with and make sure every X number of days that they give them an update. It may sound excessive but it works. He has a ton of connections who regularly help him out.

There’s even a pretty good book, called “Never Eat Alone” which talks about the power of these connections.

Those are two things that immediately came to mind. I’d be curious if any of you have heard any other nuggets of great advice that you’d like to share.

I was visiting my grandmother last weekend. This is the same grandmother that was spotted on the streets of Manhattan at age 90 and asked to be a model for GNC (blog post: My Grandmother is Amazing). She was remarking about how she loves to see photos of the great-grandkids. I have one cousin who sends her an email of a picture every day. I left feeling like i was really laking in my picture sending.

Then, enter the Postgram App. With this app, i can grab any picture on my phone or in Instagram and send it as a postcard. You enter in a message and an address and it gets sent automatically. Viola.

I’m bulling on Twitter as a social network. I think it has lots of great use cases that almost anyone could benefit from. It will only grow in popularity once people start realizing what it is.

I think Dick Costolo is a great CEO and product person. I’ve watched numerous interview with him (including this great PandoMonthly one), have followed his path since Feedburner, and I believe he has the company running on the right track and is doing a great job.

Twitter is just now starting to monetize but I think they’ll be able to pull in a good amount of money.

When I bought their market cap was 20 billion. At 10x multiples, that means they have to have yearly revenues of $2 billion. That seems feasible for me that they’ll get there.

I was happy with my purchase. Then, on Wednesday night Twitter announced their first ever earnings since going public. What a disaster it was. First off, everyone compares them to Facebook even though they are completely different. Second, they have seemed to have stopped growing. Look at this chart:

That’s not good. They need to grow. They only added 1 million US users in Q4. Wow, that is a crazy low number.

So, while I am still a believer, I think it might be a tough year or two (or three) until they hit mainstream. Trust me, it’ll be a better world when they do.

The Denver Broncos shattered records this year as the most dominant offensive team in NFL history. They scored 38 points per game this year, an NFL record. Their QB, Peyton Manning, also set records for most passing yards and touchdowns by a QB in a season. They play Seattle whose defense was the best in the league and is the fifth-best overall statistical performance of any team since 1989.

So, it will be an epic showdown of a historical great offense against a historically great defense.

If that hasn’t blown you mind enough, check this out…. the difference between the Broncos’ average-points-scored and the Seahawks average-points-allowed this season is the widest in the history of the Super Bown. It is what one website found to be “the greatest offense/defense showdown in Super Bowl history.”

Here’s a fact for you. The average IQ of the human race is increasing and the rate of increase is increasing since the 1990’s. It’s called the Flynn Effect.

I just learned that because i watched this good TED talk about video games and gamification.

He talks about what actually makes people smarter and then argues that all the items that do can be found in games. Items such as:

He also talks about a guy in White Bear Lake MN who was a successful businessman. When his kids went to school, he was appalled at the education they were getting so he quit his job, got a masters in education, and took over an elementary school class. He then replaced the entire curriculum with a video game-based curriculum.

Did it work? Well, in 18 weeks his kids went from a below 3rd grade level to an above 4th grade level. In only 18 weeks. It was because games for them were fun and multiplayer.

This speaker, Gabe Zichermann, talks about this generation of millenials, 126 million of them, and how they use games as their primary means of entertainment. This has a profound effect on society, and you can see it in the dashboard of electric cars, in Nike’s website, and all over the place.

He tells the story of a guy in Sweden, Kevin, who made a traffic camera lottery system. Before Kevin, Sweden had a system where it takes a picture of your car if it’s going over the limit, then determines how much money the drivers make, and then issues tickets at higher prices to those who make more money and lower prices for those who make less money. Kevin re-engineered the system so it also takes a picture of those people who are driving under the speed limit and it enters them into a lottery – a lottery to win all the proceeds from the other tickets from people speeding. This is game-thinking where you take a negative reinforcement loop and turn it into a positive. It works. The average speed is now 20% less than it was before.

Corporations will also be doing it:

The speech is great. Thanks to Patrick for sending it my way. All of these facts point to a future that’s pretty different than it is today. Things are faster. There are rewards everywhere. There is a lot of collaboration. I’m actually looking forward to it.

I had pretty much written Yahoo off. I thought they were dead. They hadn’t done anything new and interesting for over 5 years. Their webpages looked like crap. They were just treading water. That all changed lately. Specifically in the past 6 months, they’ve done some things that really make me think they’ll be a player in the future.

First, let’s talk about Flickr. I’ve always used it as my default photo service where i store all my photos online. It used to be the best (in 2003-2006) and then it got abandoned. I still kept putting my photos there because i was locked in, but i knew it was dead. They added one small feature a year. I had seen that playbook at AOL. It means it’s only a matter of time before it’s time to leave. Then something magical happened. They pushed out a new iPhone app for it that was actually decent. Then they updated it to make it really slick. Then they announced 1 terabyte of free storage. Then they announced automatic iPhone uploads of photos. Whoa. All of the sudden, it was one of the best photo apps on my phone. All in about a 6 month period.

Second, they released a new News Digest app that is basically The Week magazine but a daily app. It aggregates 8 to 10 recent news stories and sends them to you twice a day. Once you’ve read the morning stories, you have to wait for the evening delivery. It’s beautifully made and is really easy to consume. It’s not the main way I get mainstream news.

Finally, they launched a new Tech site that claims to be different than current tech sites. The premise being that all tech sites today are focused on the top tier tech enthusiasts and people who care a lot about Silicon Valley. Yahoo Tech will be focused on the other 90%. People who want to know what the best TV is, not which Palo Alto exec just changed jobs. I think that’s a great idea.

So, it’s good to have another player back out there. Someone is building new things and innovating. I’m excited. It seems that Yahoo! is indeed earning the exclamation point on their name.

I’m thinking about getting a new car. Mostly because i never drive my car, it frequently needs maintenance, and it just sits in my garage depreciating. So, i’d like to have a less expensive, more reliable car depreciating.

Of course, the car i want is the Tesla. It has everything a guy could want. But it’s too expensive and the Tesla SUV (the Tesla X) isn’t available yet. So, back to the drawing board. I’ll keep you posted as to what i get around to.

In the meantime, i thought i’d write a little about why I think Tesla is so great. One key characteristic is how they release their cars. Most car manufacturers do a waterfall-style release schedule, meaning they do one step of the manufacturing process after another in a linear way:

First, design the car and call it a model name (usually after a year)

Second, produce the car in a factory

Finally, release the car to the public

Then, start the process over again with a different model.

Most software companies (Kapost included) do it a different way, called “continuous deployment” where you release your product and then continuously update it every day, week and month. This way you can take customer feedback and immediately make change and improvements for all customers.

Telsa is doing this too. Their Model S sedan downloads firmware updates on a regular basis. These software changes go much further than simply changing user interface elements in the dashboard (which is a monster 11 inch touch screen). Instead, Tesla will modify major elements of the car from the suspension to its acceleration and handling characteristics. When they found out that people were lowering the height of the car too much on highways resulting in fires from drivers running into debris, they made a quick firmware update not allowing the car to be lowered as much.

What’s even cooler about doing this continuous release cycle is that Tesla has broken automobiles traditional release schedule. Rather than waiting a year to roll out a new Model S, they have been continuously improving the product every quarter on the assembly line. There are no model years to differentiate a Model S in 2012 from one in 2014.

That’s just one of the reasons they’ll disrupting the industry. I love it.

I wrote a few weeks ago a post about just how massive the site is. I listened to a good interview with Jason Calcanis recently where he shared his experiences working with them as a potential partner.

The short of it is that YouTube has not been at all interested in accommodating any partners because of their size and scale. One thing that i found interesting in this talk was just how powerful the future of YouTube is. Some interesting points:

Nobody’s in charge. Google is great at this in general. It is very hard to identify who is setting the direction and strategy for each group and the company as a whole. Because of this, they can’t be critiqued for lack of execution or for being evil.

Avoiding Anti-Trust. They can’t buy any large players due to the fear that the government would block it for anti-competition reasons.

They are copying competitor’s strategies. These competitors are getting lots of video channels around a niche and selling ads around it. YouTube is now doing just that and will probably do more.

The cool part of this is that YouTube could have bought Netflix or something similar. Thus, they are just going to buy lots and lots of content and put it out for free. My prediction is that You’ll see NFL and other sports content available there along with full tv shows – and it’ll be SWEET for all of us.

2013 was an interesting year. Here are a few of the things I’ll remember about it:

Diane and I bought our first house. After 3 years in Denver, we moved up to Boulder and bought a nice little house in North Boulder. It’s the perfect size and location. It’s close both to downtown (where we work) and the mountains so our commute is nothing and we can walk to the hiking trails. It’s a huge game changer.

My stint as a single parent. I’ll never forget the 10 weeks I spent taking care of Hunter. The baths, the feedings, the walks, the coordinating with the nanny – I got to really understand what it’s like to be responsible. I really think it’s made me a much better parent now having that experience. It also made Diane really happy which makes me happy. I love it when she shines – there’s nothing better.

I lost 20 pounds. During that time with Hunter, i got into a running routine and ate a bunch less for dinner, and as a result i dropped some serious weight. Although i put some back on over the holidays, it was game changing for me. I feel a lot better both physically and mentally. I’m still keeping to the 4x a week routine and should be able to keep the weight down to 170-175 (I was at 193)

This past year was a pivotal year for Kapost. We really grew the business and we hired some incredible folks. We went from 13 people to 42 and from under 400k in revenue to 1.8MM.

The Boulder flood was an incredible experience. Seeing that much rain and what i can do to a town is frightening. It destroyed our basement but nowhere near what it did to others. Seeing a rush of water crush down your front door is a nightmare. Here’s a video of a friend’s apartment building where they all had to be rescued from the second floor.

Becoming an uncle. I’m so happy for Liz and Mike. Knowing all the crap they went through to try to have a kid, then to finally get pregnant, then to have such a beautiful girl come into the world – I’m so happy both for them and for me. It’s really fun having that girl around and i can’t wait for Hunter and Reagan to become friends.

Those are the things that pop out in my mind in 2013. Here’s to a great 2014!

I did a lot of couch reading this holiday and as a result found some good stuff on the interwebs and thought I’d share…

1. The Paul Rudd & Conan video

Paul Rudd has been going on Conan O’Brien’s show for 20 years. Each year he brings a clip to promote a new film. Apparently, every time he brings the same video clip every time. Here’s a video showing all of them. This is pretty hysterical.

2. Bill Gates’s Good News of 2013

Here’s a post from Bill Gates about the good things that happened this year. Gates is out there solving real problems and he has such a unique perspective of how things are improving on a global level. This is worth reading. For instance, he lets us know:

Half as many children died in 2012 as in 1990. That’s the biggest decline ever recorded. And hardly anyone knows about it!

3. Billy Joel at MSG

Billy (now age 64) hasn’t released a record since 1993 and hasn’t toured since he wrapped up his last gig in 2010, but he’s still changing the music business. He recently signed a deal with Madison Square Garden to play a concert there every month. A good article in businessweek.

We have two cats and love them (most of the time) and I loved this video of a mean old woman getting karma right in the face.

7. Pregnant Virgins

Here’s an Interesting study here of 8000 women about how they got pregnant. Almost 1% of them said they got pregnant with no men involved (and no in vitro or other reproductive technology). Here’s to immaculate conception.

Happy Holidays everyone. (note: if you want to regularly get my links, follow me as @MikePLewis on twitter)

There are a lot of talking and articles about what the price of bitcoin is these days. These drive me nuts. They are missing the point completely. Here’s why…

First, i like bitcoin because it’s a technology. If you ask anyone who knows about technology, they love bitcoin (see here). It is because bitcoin is first and foremost a protocol. It has the potential to be the transaction and financial protocol for the entire internet. This doesn’t exist now. There hasn’t been a layer of internet infrastructure that was global, distributed, and not owned by any one person or company for payments. This is a technology-based architecture that looks like TCP/IP or HTTP. It can be fundamental to the internet. This is why investors and entrepreneurs are gaga about it. It can be used (and will be used) to create applications on top of and we’ll see payments and money flow on the internet in the same way we see content, images and everything else flows on the internet. It will not be controlled by any one company like PayPal or Visa and money will be unlocked.

What’s also really interested about the protocol is that there is a ledger (called blockchain) that is global, distributed, peer-to-peer that exists on every bitcoin wallet so that every bitcoin transaction clears publicly.

Second, I like bitcoin because it can be a currency. I want to pay for stuff using bitcoins and i’m way less likely to do this if the price is $300 one day and $1200 the next. I need it to be stable. I don’t want to “invest” in bitcoin, i want to use it. I don’t invest in US dollars, i use them. I want to do the same with bitcoins as i believe that this is the future of it. So, please stop treating it like a commodity (like gold).

I’m still getting used to it and i’m excited to see what applications are built to use it. I’ll be out there testing them

I was sad to hear about Nelson Mandella’s death today. He was an amazing person. Some history about him….

Born into a traditional Aftrican tribe, he was sent to boarding school. In his spare time, he studied to become a lawyer so that he could protect blacks. Work as a lawyer strengthened his feelings against apartheid (which segregated and discriminated against blacks in South Africa).

He joined the African National Congress (ANC), which, at the time, was polite to the government. Soon Nelson Mandela had persuaded the ANC to use boycotts and strikes against the government instead of being polite. He was arrested for civil disobedience, and was not allowed to attend gatherings.

After a massacre, Nelson went underground and created the MK – a military portion of the ANC. He launched a sabotage campaign. On his return from Algeria he was arrested for going between countries without a passport, and was tried for sabotage and attempting to overthrow the government. He spent the next 28 years in prison.

While Nelson was in prison he was offered freedom if he would stop his violent actions. He refused this offer.

In July of 1991, Nelson Mandela was appointed President of the ANC. Nelson decided to join the government and other parties to negotiate South Africa’s future. Finally everyone came to agree on a majority rule constitution. This constitution states that racial discrimination it is against the law.

In 1993, Nelson Mandela shared the Nobel Peace Prize with F.W. de Klerk for dismantling apartheid, and in 1994 he became the first democratically elected South African president.

He was quite a guy and truly shows how one man can make a difference in this world. Well done Mandela.

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

This was 5 years ago. Since then we’ve had some new technology advancements – such as Siri and voice search. I’m seeing the impacts of this on my 1-year old (Hunter) every day.

Both my wife and i have iPhones and we regularly use Siri to compose text messages as we frequently have our son in our arms and no hands free. As a result, he thinks this is just the way you interact with phones. Check these videos out:

These kids are definitely going to have a different experience with technology than the rest of us. It’ll be fascinating to see.

One of the more interesting learnings I’ve learned at Kapost is what makes SaaS business models work. Related to that I often get the question asked to me, “How is Kapost doing? Is it profitable yet?” implying that if it isn’t, things are bad and if it is, then things are good. This post is an attempt to address that question.

When talking about a company’s performance, I’ve noticed that you have to talk about both its growth and profitability, and discussing just one in the absence of the other is dumb.

I recently did a post comparing Salesforce and Linkedin. You’ll notice in there that neither company is profitable yet both are worth over $30 billion dollars. LinkedIn makes a $1 billion a year in revenue, whereas Salesforce does $1 billion a quarter ($4 billion a year). Why are they worth the same? Because LinkedIn is growing at 60% a year whereas Salesforce is growing at 30%.

To investors, companies are worth what their cash flow is going to be in the future – not what it is now. That’s all they care about. If they think the cash flow will be huge, the company will command a huge valuation.

Let’s take Amazon.com as an example. They have had no profits for years, yet it’s currently worth $166 billion. One analyst even jokes about it, writing:

With every Amazon quarterly earnings call, my Twitter feed lights up with jokes about how Amazon continues to grow its revenue and make no profits and how trusting investors continue to rewards the company for it. The apotheosis of that line of thoughts is a quote from Slate’s Matthew Yglesias earlier this year: “Amazon, as best I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers.”

The point here is that you need to understand why any company is not profitable. In the case of Amazon, it is making huge investments in warehouses to grow its retailing business and huge investments in data centers to grow its AWS business. It could stop making those investments and start generating profits. But doing so will sacrifice growth in the market they current work in. Amazon’s doing $70 billion in revenue this year and did $34 billion in 2010. Here’s Amazon’s revenue since 1996:

That’s doubling in 3 years. That’s pretty amazing. I’m sure it’d be worse if they were focusing on profitability.

What does this mean for Kapost? Kapost has established itself as the market leader in content marketing software and hit profitability early in 2013. However, we desired to grow and grow quickly. Thus, we raised a round of funding and are using the those funds to accelerate our growth.

Why can’t we grow organically with our profits?

The way SaaS businesses work is that they face significant losses in the early years because they have to invest upfront to acquire customers, but they recover the profits from that investment over a long period of time (the life of the customer). What’s somewhat strange for people to understand about SaaS businesses is that the faster the business decides to grow, the worse the initial losses become.

For example, imagine a world we you spend $6,000 to acquire a customer, and then charge them $500 per month. For one customer, you’ll get the money back after a year, but you need $6k up front first to get them. And, if you want to grow faster and get even more customers, you have to spend even more money. The graph below shows that the more you spend, the better the rate of growth is.

This is why Kapost did another round of funding. Going forward, as long as we’re accelerating the rate of revenue growth, we’ll always be needing more money and more money that we’ll need to fund that growth. That is, unless we don’t want our rate of growth to increase.

Now, of couse, profits are critical to the health of a business. The key is to be able to be profitable if we want to be and to be profitable at some point in the future, at least hypothetically. So, when you hear that a company is losing money, don’t read that as a necessarily bad thing. It could be a very good thing. It all depends on why.

I recently read a post about advertising on online video. It’s a good post but probably too detailed for most people. One thing in the post that stuck out is how big Walmart is and also how big YouTube is. It got me thinking. Pretty interesting stuff about two behemoths of our time. Here are some details:

Walmart is ginormous:

8% of every dollar spent in America is spent at Walmart

They have more than 4,000 locations and sell more than $34 billion / month.

If Walmart were a country it would be the 19th largest in the world.

YouTube is also huge:

1 billion monthly uniques hit the site

40% of the online population uses YouTube every month

6 billion hours of watched video a month. That’s enough for every human on earth to watch 150 videos a year.

63% of all videos watched in the US are on YouTube

The point of the article is that if you’re in the online video business, it’s foolish to try to do anything without thinking about YouTube. Similarly, it’d be foolish for a retailer to not want to sell their product through Walmart.

Saturday Night Live is definitely hit or miss. Sometimes they can crush a skit but then the follow that up with 4 skits that aren’t even remotely funny. That said, i watch every week and generally find myself laughing at least at a few of the skits.

A recent skit that Diane and I both loved was this Wes Anderson horror movie trailer:

What’s even better is the guy who created the short blogged the whole thing and talked about how hard it was to mimic Wes’s style – and how hard it is to film a horror movie trailer in the middle of NYC. Its’ a great read if you love Wes Anderson films. Makes you appreciate how hard his crazy style is.

Starting a business is hard. There’s always the fear of failing and when things fail, the idea that it was all your fault and you could have done things better. It’s a shitty feeling. That’s what struck me about this poem below was it celebrates the accomplishment before the failure. I often think about the skiing mantra, “if you’re not falling, you’re not trying hard enough.”

So, to all of you who are trying to reach the sun like Icarus, bless you, and keep on flying…

Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.It’s the same when love comes to an end,or the marriage fails and people saythey knew it was a mistake, that everybodysaid it would never work. That she wasold enough to know better. But anythingworth doing is worth doing badly.Like being there by that summer oceanon the other side of the island whilelove was fading out of her, the starsburning so extravagantly those nights thatanyone could tell you they would never last.Every morning she was asleep in my bedlike a visitation, the gentleness in herlike antelope standing in the dawn mist.Each afternoon I watched her coming backthrough the hot stony field after swimming,the sea light behind her and the huge skyon the other side of that. Listened to herwhile we ate lunch. How can they saythe marriage failed? Like the people whocame back from Provence (when it was Provence)and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,but just coming to the end of his triumph.

I like playing this game. It’s a game where you have to force yourself to choose to invest between two (arguably) overpriced companies. I’m been doing it once a year between Foursquare and Quora. Go ahead and make your vote there.

I read today in a good article about LinkedIn’s business that the two companies LinkedIn and Salesforce.com have the roughly the same market cap at $30 billion (Linkedin lately has cruised past it even more to $32). So here’s the game: If you had to put 80% of your entire life savings into stock of one of these companies, which do you choose? A breakdown:

LinkedIn:

Current market cap: $32 billion

2013 Q2 revenue: $364 million

Net income last quarter: $3.7 million

Growth rate: 12% last quarter & 60% over the last 12 months

Salesforce

Current market cap: $30 billion

2013 Q3 revenue: $957 million

Net Income in Q3: $76 million

Growth rate: 7% last quarter & 31% over the last 12 months

I think from these comparisons, you can see that SF is twice the size, but growing at half the rate. If both companies keep growing at the same rate, LinkedIn will be bigger in 5.5 years and almost double the size of Salesforce in 9 years. The market really rewards growth and doesn’t seem to care about profits from newish companies.

Personally, i’m putting my money into Salesforce, but it’s interesting to see how much the market loves LinkedIn. In my daily work life, i use both. We have all our sales information in Salesforce and can’t operate without it. All of tools plug into it (Eloqua, Totango, Desk.com, etc.). At the same time we’re hiring and not a day goes by where i’m not looking at someone at LinkedIn or trying to contact them through that platform. It’s proven to be invaluable when hiring. I can see it breaking into new businesses and growing fast.

That said, i can’t see Salesforce being replaced any time soon – and the pricing is much better. We pay less than $1000 a year for LinkedIn (for the ability to message people) but well over $30k a year for Salesforce.

Who would you bet on?

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

I recently heard someone talk about what a bad move it was for Apple to release their own Maps app on the iPhone. I’ve heard this maybe half a dozen times lately and I couldn’t disagree more. We should all be happy this happened. Here’s why…

About a year ago when there was no Apple Maps, the situation was this:

The default map app on the phone was Google maps

Apple had repeatedly been negotiating with Google to have them provide turn-by-turn directions and voice navigation in their app on the iPhone. Google had turned them down time and time again so they could promote Android phones and claim some level of superiority.

Apple had no alternative but to accept that Google was sandbagging their iPhone app

Fast forward to today. Apple releases Maps which has turn-by-turn directions that are way better than the old Google app. Google was rendered to be an optional app on phone and because of this fact they stepped up their development efforts and made the Google maps app way better than their previous app.

Today iPhone users have two great options for maps and both options are way better than they had a year ago. If Apple hadn’t done anything, we’d probably still be stuck with a second-tier version of Google maps.

So, Apple’s probably pretty happy with their decision. The iPhone mapping capability is at the very least comparable to Android, something they couldn’t claim a year ago.

Ok, i can now go back to work. Thanks for letting me rant.

May 2015 Update:

Looking at this latest report you can see that 84% of cell phone users get turn-by-turn navigation while driving. Looks like Apple made a good call to really shake up the platform to get that functionality in there.

So, i don’t know if i’ve told you this, Dear Reader, but I’ve been doing the Mr. Mom thing over here for 3 week. I’m doing this because Diane is working in Colorado Springs Monday-Friday on a film. It’s always been her dream to both work in Colorado and work on films. This was her first opportunity, and passing on it was just not in the cards. So, i’m not at home, a la Michael Keaton.

So, what have I learned in these three weeks:

Being the only parent is both really hard and not that bad. It’s not that specific moments are super painful, but it’s just that it’s relentless. There’s no rest. There’s no snooze button in the morning if you go to bed late. There’s nobody there to take a turn. You just have to suck it up. I’ve gotten pretty good at it. It’s also not that bad in that Hunter goes to bed at 7 or 7:30 every night and i am home alone with free time. I can’t remember the last time i had this much free time to myself. Of course, i can’t leave the house, but still, it’s something.

I live in fear of middle-of-the-night wake ups. Seriously, i get incredibly nervous that he’ll wake up. Why? Because he can wake up at any time and with it he can destroy your next 24-36 hours. What started out as a nice night of sleep can turn into a night of only 3-4 hours of sleep creating a walking zombie the next day. This happens because i have lots of trouble getting back to sleep once i’m up for 20-30 minutes with a crying baby. The adrenaline is pumping and i’m wide awake. I live in fear every night. It’s crazy. I look at him sleeping in the monitor as just a ticking time bomb.

I’m pretty clean. I don’t do much around the house. I don’t use many dishes. I keep my clothes off the floor. I find that the house looks pretty good. Hmm, who knew?

Television is a social habit for me now. I love watching shows with Diane. We chat about the characters, the situations, who we like, hate, and how we want the series to go. I have found that i get very little satisfaction watching shows by myself. In fact, in the three weeks i’ve been doing this, i’ve not turned the TV. Now, reading is a different story. I’ve read more in these three week than i did the entire year previously.

Being the primary person in your kid’s eyes is awesome. I quickly became elevated from just “that guy next to mom” to “a guy i need to pay attention to.” When he sees me now his face lights up. When he crawls, he looks for me before he goes any further. And when he’s scared, he crawls into my arms. It’s fantastic.

I have no social life. I get home from Kapost and immediately go to work. I do a solid food round (20 min), a bath (20 min), a bottle feeding (20 min), play time (20 min). After that, it’s time for bed. He goes down and then my night begins. In that time i need to answer about a million emails, do some work, and get dinner (with the time bomb ticking the entire time). Did you hear “hang out with my buddies” anywhere in there? So, in short, this is my way of saying: see you in a month or two when this experiment is over.

This speech, sent to me by my cousin Nelly, really made my night tonight. It’s by Syracuse professor and NYTimes writer George Saunders.

I think it’s a great message we all should listen to:

Down through the ages, a traditional form has evolved for this type of speech, which is: Some old fart, his best years behind him, who, over the course of his life, has made a series of dreadful mistakes (that would be me), gives heartfelt advice to a group of shining, energetic young people, with all of their best years ahead of them (that would be you).

And I intend to respect that tradition.

Now, one useful thing you can do with an old person, in addition to borrowing money from them, or asking them to do one of their old-time “dances,” so you can watch, while laughing, is ask: “Looking back, what do you regret?” And they’ll tell you. Sometimes, as you know, they’ll tell you even if you haven’t asked. Sometimes, even when you’ve specifically requested they not tell you, they’ll tell you.

So: What do I regret? Being poor from time to time? Not really. Working terrible jobs, like “knuckle-puller in a slaughterhouse?” (And don’t even ASK what that entails.) No. I don’t regret that. Skinny-dipping in a river in Sumatra, a little buzzed, and looking up and seeing like 300 monkeys sitting on a pipeline, pooping down into the river, the river in which I was swimming, with my mouth open, naked? And getting deathly ill afterwards, and staying sick for the next seven months? Not so much. Do I regret the occasional humiliation? Like once, playing hockey in front of a big crowd, including this girl I really liked, I somehow managed, while falling and emitting this weird whooping noise, to score on my own goalie, while also sending my stick flying into the crowd, nearly hitting that girl? No. I don’t even regret that.

But here’s something I do regret:

In seventh grade, this new kid joined our class. In the interest of confidentiality, her Convocation Speech name will be “ELLEN.” ELLEN was small, shy. She wore these blue cat’s-eye glasses that, at the time, only old ladies wore. When nervous, which was pretty much always, she had a habit of taking a strand of hair into her mouth and chewing on it.

So she came to our school and our neighborhood, and was mostly ignored, occasionally teased (“Your hair taste good?” – that sort of thing). I could see this hurt her. I still remember the way she’d look after such an insult: eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, as if, having just been reminded of her place in things, she was trying, as much as possible, to disappear. After awhile she’d drift away, hair-strand still in her mouth. At home, I imagined, after school, her mother would say, you know: “How was your day, sweetie?” and she’d say, “Oh, fine.” And her mother would say, “Making any friends?” and she’d go, “Sure, lots.”

Sometimes I’d see her hanging around alone in her front yard, as if afraid to leave it.

And then – they moved. That was it. No tragedy, no big final hazing.

One day she was there, next day she wasn’t.

End of story.

Now, why do I regret that? Why, forty-two years later, am I still thinking about it? Relative to most of the other kids, I was actually pretty nice to her. I never said an unkind word to her. In fact, I sometimes even (mildly) defended her.

But still. It bothers me. So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it:
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded…sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.
Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth?

Those who were kindest to you, I bet.

It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.
Now, the million-dollar question: What’s our problem? Why aren’t we kinder?

Here’s what I think:

Each of us is born with a series of built-in confusions that are probably somehow Darwinian. These are: (1) we’re central to the universe (that is, our personal story is the main and most interesting story, the only story, really); (2) we’re separate from the universe (there’s US and then, out there, all that other junk – dogs and swing-sets, and the State of Nebraska and low-hanging clouds and, you know, other people), and (3) we’re permanent (death is real, o.k., sure – for you, but not for me).

Now, we don’t really believe these things – intellectually we know better – but we believe them viscerally, and live by them, and they cause us to prioritize our own needs over the needs of others, even though what we really want, in our hearts, is to be less selfish, more aware of what’s actually happening in the present moment, more open, and more loving.

So, the second million-dollar question: How might we DO this? How might we become more loving, more open, less selfish, more present, less delusional, etc., etc?

Well, yes, good question.

Unfortunately, I only have three minutes left.

So let me just say this. There are ways. You already know that because, in your life, there have been High Kindness periods and Low Kindness periods, and you know what inclined you toward the former and away from the latter. Education is good; immersing ourselves in a work of art: good; prayer is good; meditation’s good; a frank talk with a dear friend; establishing ourselves in some kind of spiritual tradition – recognizing that there have been countless really smart people before us who have asked these same questions and left behind answers for us.

Because kindness, it turns out, is hard – it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include…well,everything.

One thing in our favor: some of this “becoming kinder” happens naturally, with age. It might be a simple matter of attrition: as we get older, we come to see how useless it is to be selfish – how illogical, really. We come to love other people and are thereby counter-instructed in our own centrality. We get our butts kicked by real life, and people come to our defense, and help us, and we learn that we’re not separate, and don’t want to be. We see people near and dear to us dropping away, and are gradually convinced that maybe we too will drop away (someday, a long time from now). Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving. I think this is true. The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was “mostly Love, now.”

And so, a prediction, and my heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love. YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE. If you have kids, that will be a huge moment in your process of self-diminishment. You really won’t care what happens to YOU, as long as they benefit. That’s one reason your parents are so proud and happy today. One of their fondest dreams has come true: you have accomplished something difficult and tangible that has enlarged you as a person and will make your life better, from here on in, forever.

Congratulations, by the way.

When young, we’re anxious – understandably – to find out if we’ve got what it takes. Can we succeed? Can we build a viable life for ourselves? But you – in particular you, of this generation – may have noticed a certain cyclical quality to ambition. You do well in high-school, in hopes of getting into a good college, so you can do well in the good college, in the hopes of getting a good job, so you can do well in the good job so you can….
And this is actually O.K. If we’re going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously – as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers. We have to do that, to be our best selves.

Still, accomplishment is unreliable. “Succeeding,” whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.

So, quick, end-of-speech advice: Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really:selfishness. But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf – seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.

Do all the other things, the ambitious things – travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for monkey poop) – but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness. Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial. That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality – your soul, if you will – is as bright and shining as any that has ever been. Bright as Shakespeare’s, bright as Gandhi’s, bright as Mother Teresa’s. Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.
And someday, in 80 years, when you’re 100, and I’m 134, and we’re both so kind and loving we’re nearly unbearable, drop me a line, let me know how your life has been. I hope you will say: It has been so wonderful.

Congratulations, Class of 2013.

I wish you great happiness, all the luck in the world, and a beautiful summer.

I don’t really like Google Glass as it is now. There’s no way that the look of it will ever let it go mainstream. However, i do like:

how you can just click a button and video record everything you’re looking at

Take a picture of what you’re seeing quickly and easily

Overlay a map on top of whatever you’re viewing

What i want to happen is for them to build just these three use cases into normal looking glasses. Get a few versions of Warby Parker that have Glass integration into them. Then it’ll be sweet. I want to wear regular-looking glasses and go about my day and if i want just touch something and have it start recording. That’s when Google Glass wins.

I’ve said this a million times and i’ll say it again for the record. If you’re a music internet application and you have full music streams, you’re not making any money.
I was reminded about this again today when i read this article about Spotify:

Spotify’s 2012 results are out today, with Reuters reporting that the private company had revenue of 435 million euros, and a 58.7 million euro net loss.

The revenue figure is impressive, more than doubling 2011′s 190 million euro tally. However, the company’s net loss widened in the year, even as it saw a dramatic expansion of its top line from 45.4 million euros to the aforementioned 58.7 million figure.

For some background, Toby and I founded the music company Qloud back in 2006. We had 20 million monthly users, did over a million streams a day, and were acquired by SpinMedia. But, given that kind of traffic, there was still no way we could make money. Let me explain why:

If you need music for your product, you need to sign contracts with the major music labels. There are 4 of them. These labels require upfront payments of around a million dollars a one or two year deal (at least at the time they did). Your payments to them are then debited out of those upfront payments. So, you need a good amount of capital to even get started.

The major labels have seen big tech companies receive big payouts (such as Last.fm’s $200 million exit) and are upset that tech companies are making money while their business erodes. As a result, they want equity in any company they do a deal with so they can share in the upside.

The major labels do not think the success of your company is due to your product chops or your ability to market well. No, they believe your success is due to the quality of their content.

This is the most important one: Your contract with them is for one or two years. If you report a profit at the end of the term, they will interpret that fact as their cut is too small and you can expect to pay more in your next deal.

That last point is the key point. You’ll never make a profit. They will never allow for it. You’ve signed a deal with the devil and unless you can have a product that doesn’t rely on a mainstream back catalog of music (i.e. eMusic), you’re screwed.

So, while i love Spotify and Rdio and use them all the time, don’t expect them to IPO any time soon, or ever.

I love watching standup comedy. I’ve always thought that good standup is 50% content and 50% delivery. Some people are great at delivery (Sam Kinison, Aziz, Michael Richards) and some people have great content (Patton Oswalt), some are just pretty good at both (Jim Gaffigan, Daniel Tosh), while the legends are great at both (Chris Rock, Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle).

It had been a while since I’d seen Jerry Seinfeld do standup, but I recently went and saw him that the Buell Theater in Denver. Let me tell you, he killed it. I was crying for most of the show. He’s still got it. Here’s a clip of some of his new stuff that he did on Jimmy Fallon:

I also listed to him on Howard Stern where he did a really long interview. He goes deep into his process of creating a joke and while he’s still doing comedy. I love long interviews like this.

Some items

Talks about how bad network TV execs are about being able to determine what is funny. What they are good at is finding funny people, but the more involvement

He was offered over $100 million to do another season of Seinfeld show

He has a strong sense that timing is everything. He knows how great his TV show was, he’s loath to do another one, he knows it could never be as good. As he says, you can love a comedian at an hour and 10 minutes and hate him at an hour and 30 and that’s why he had to end the show. He said that the audience would turn on him if they did another season.

He thought that Martin Short could have played the Kramer character

He saw no need to put women and blacks on “Seinfeld,” but after ten episodes Colin Quinn told him he was gonna get in trouble for it, and he did.

One of my new favorite things to do is watch the PandoMonthly videos. They are really long – usually over 90 minutes – but it is a super in-depth interview with one of the internet’s big dogs. My favorite one so far is a 2-hour video with John Doerr who worked early on at Intel and sits on the board of Google and Amazon.

Last night i watched Fred Wilson’s interview. Some highlights:

He talked about how it was a huge loss for Twitter to not buy Instagram. He thought that with the trifecta of tweets, images and video, Twitter could challenge and possibly unseat Facebook. But Twitter didn’t have the assets that FB had of pre-IPO shares or valuation to be able to offer them the amount they needed, thus they lost the sale. He remarked on how it was just genius for Zuckerberg to recognize that possibility.

He talked about CEO’s of his portfolios such as the Twitter trifecta, Etsy and Tumblr. How Twitter is like the Beatles in that it had multiple creators who were all vital at different stages: Jack at stage 1 in building the product, Ev at stage 2 in building the company and Dick at stage 3 in building the business. He also points to this terrific post about how Tumblr is all about David Karp and is really a one-person product.

On that he told a story about how at Etsy, they were promoting the #2 guy to the CEO position and he went to the board and said, “hey, you’re promoting the wrong guy. That guy down the hall is beloved by the company, runs the biggest business unit and bleeds Etsy. You should promote him.” Pretty cool story of something putting the company’s interest above theirs.

Hating Saas: he talked about why he hates investing in Saas companies (1:18 mark) because they get commoditized too easily.

About bitcoin: he talked about how it is the closest thing he’s seen to a replacement for cash money and that’s why he’s investing. He’s also investing there because he’s burnt out on social.

About SnapChat: It’s not a replacement of instagram, but rather the text message (or WhatApp). It’s not a photo service but rather a messaging service. (see my thoughts on Snapchat here)

About blogging every day: He hates how media distorts his message so he’s taken it on himself to create his own media so he can control it.

This is a photo sending service much like others but it’s also totally different. What is it? It’s a way to send photos to people. What you do is:

Take a photo

Choose how long the user receiving the photo can see it

Send the photo to one or more people

On the service, it seems like just a simple app, but the step number 2 above makes it completely different. Having an app that removes a saved copy of a photo frees you to take stupid pics and reply to stupid pics with other stupid pics. At one lunch, i must have sent 10 photos to someone because the photos were little messages not items to be admired. And, i’m not the only one. Check out the number of photos flying through the service:

In a world where we have unlimited storage, it seems strange that people want an app where the photos don’t exist. But it’s not about the storage or lack thereof, it’s about the expectations. With the photos disappearing you are free to take a chance and make something whimsical. I love it.

If you haven’t tried it, sign up and send me a photo. It’s pretty fun.

Student debt is HUGE. Student debt over last 10 years has doubled to a trillion dollars. Here’ the breakdown:

People can’t get jobs still. 50% of people graduating from University are unemployed or underemployed

It’s not just poor, it’s a lot of people. 2/3 of all students graduating in 2008 took on debt

It’s a problem that isn’t being solved. Of the 2008 grads that took on debt only 22% of these are current (aka up to speed on their payments)
It’s not just young people anymore. 34% of all outstanding debt in US is held by people 40 years or older

This is fundamental problem in America and it’s impacting everyone at all ages and areas. I feel like it should get great attention and be a bigger part of the “what’s wrong with America” conversation.

Luckily, the changes in the education system will cause more schools with more affordable opportunities to emerge. Kahn Academy U can’t come fast enough apparently.

I’m just happy that someone is keeping track of this. However, i wish it wasn’t money raised but revenues or net revenue or something like that. I know it’s harder to capture, but it sends a better message.

The Vikings announced a while ago that they would build a new stadium, but just this week they revealed what it’d look like – and whoa is it beautiful. The new stadium will be one of the advanced, state-of-the-art facilities in the world. Some highlights:

Clear is the new retractable:There is no retractable roof, but it will be made entirely of cutting edge materials and glass that will make the roof and the sides clear. There will also be five clear pivoting doors that will be the largest in the world of their kind:

VersatilityThis will be the most versatile sports facility in the US, capable of hosting Final Fours, World Cup or MLS soccer, concerts, baseball, or Super Bowls. It will seat 65,000, expandable to 73,000 for the Super Bowl.

Total BallerThis is probably the coolest stadium I’ve ever seen. The innovation with the largest pivoting glass doors in the world, to the largest clear roof in the world and the first on a stadium in the nation, to the bowl that is level with the street as you walk in, to the modern lines and glass ceiling just combines well and works

About 10 months ago, I watched this video on Kickstarter and was really intrigued about the thought of having a watch send me updates from my iPhone.

I put some money down in May 2012 and waited. And waited. And waited. It just so happens that I wasn’t the only one who wanted this. The guys at Pebble raised over $10 million for their watch. They then got started mass producing the watches which proved to be harder than they thought. That said, last month I finally received my watch – almost 11 months after I backed the project.

What do I think? Well, it’s pretty fun to get text messages to your watch so you don’t have to pick up your phone each time you hear a buzz. It’s much more convenient to just glance at your watch. On the other hand, I don’t care too much for the custom watch faces. They are cool but lose their novelty in about 10 minutes. They are getting more apps ready to work with it but at the moment the watch doesn’t do much other than send me texts and tell the time. Also, because of the bluetooth connection, it sucks battery life down on your phone. I found that i had to charge both the watch and the phone all the time which was pretty inconvenient. I read that Runkeeper integration just launched, so i’ll be checking that out and it might make the watch a must-have for a run, (but i doubt it because i’ll already be looking at my phone for tunes).

Apple, Google and others have been rumored of building a watch – and Sony just made one (see image below). I’m a huge fan of wearable computing, but after playing with the Pebble for a while, I think that it’d be a big mistake. These devices aren’t game-changing the way that the iPhone, iPad or even Google Glass is. They are just an extension of your phone’s connectivity. Don’t do it guys. It’s just not worth it. I could see regular watch makers building in connectivity to iPhone and Android’s in the future. That seems to make more sense.

I got this email from a friend of mine who works in the newspaper business. It’s tough times for those folk and it’s only going to get worse. I thought his email was a good look at what’s actually happening. Here it is:

I can now check off “fired” from my bucket list. That’s right, after four years as a features reporter at the New York Daily News, I have been canned. No surprise. It was a long time in the making. Five months, to be exact. But the swiftness and finality of the act still threw me for a loop.The day after my arch-nemesis – a fashion editor whose idea of a good article is “50 purses under $50″ – became my fifth managing editor, she called me into a side office and told me, “This isn’t working out. We’re terminating your employment here effective immediately.”

I wanted to tell her she was an awful manager, a poor editor and a vile individual. But all I said was, “OK,” before my buddy, the janitor, apologetically led me out of the building and left me standing on Sixth Ave. No exit interview. No parting gift. Not even a shot of whiskey.

I couldn’t help but try to do the math. 723 articles, 63 celebrity interviews, 106 Best of New York columns, three editor-in-chiefs, five managing editors and countless sleepless nights added up to nothing more than standing on Avenue of the Americas with a handful of crumpled papers, two half-filled legal pads and a cup of cold coffee.

So I started walking. I guess I was looking for a bar, but before I could find one (it’s tougher than you think to find a good bar in midtown) I walked pastValducci’s Pizza Truck on 51st and 5th Ave. And right there on the side of the truck was a huge, laminated copy of an article I wrote that named Valducci’s as one of the best Sicilian slices in New York.

The math suddenly became much clearer. My articles weren’t about lifting my spirits, but those of the people I wrote about. Sure, my articles were no longer valued by my editor at the newspaper, who didn’t care about a pizza pies unless Lindsay Lohan threw them up, but it certainly meant a lot to small business owners like the Vallerio family of Staten Island, who have been slinging pies since 1999. I didn’t let down the newspaper. The newspaper let down the readers. Honestly, would you rather discover the best place in NYC to find a Sicilian slice or read about how Britney Spears forgot to wear underwear and showed the world her Sicilian slice?

Anyway, I think the lesson here is that sometimes you go looking for a drink but instead find some perspective. I’ll be okay. The newspaper, well, that’s a different story. In the meantime, if you hear of a gig for a decent writer, shoot me a line.

The good news is that companies are hiring up ex-journalists like hot cakes to help run their content marketing departments so folks like this won’t be on the street for long.

I loved Roger Ebert. Not just his writings, but everything he did as a journalist and movie lover. I read his reviews, his books, his twitter stream and his newsletter. If I watched a film and loved it, i would then immediately read Ebert’s review to see if he loved it too. He had a great way of thinking about a film and describing why it worked and why it didn’t that went beyond his “thumbs up” rating. Each review was more essay than review and that gave us a glimpse into the mind of Ebert as much as it did the quality of the film.

I always loved this quote from Ebert that he wrote in his book where he talks about the tediousness of watching movies every day and the shift to DVD’s and Video-On-Demand:

What I miss though, is the wonder. People my age can remember walking into a movie palace where the ceiling was far overhead, and balconies and mezzanines reached away into the shadows. We remember the sound of a thousand people laughing at once. And screens the size of billboards, so every seat in the house was a good seat. “I lost it at the movies,” Pauline Kael said, and we all knew just what she meant.

When you go to the movies every day, it sometimes seems as if the movies are more mediocre than ever, more craven and cowardly, more skillfully manufactured to pander to the lowest tastes instead of educating them. Then you see something absolutely miraculous, and on your way out you look distracted, as if you had just experienced some kind of a vision.

That is what we all love about movies. I know that feeling of walking out of a theater after just having my socks knocked off. That happened to me in a New Hampshire theater for “Saving Private Ryan” or as a teenager with “Pulp Fiction.” That feeling of being blown away is just incredible and what sustained Ebert.

His passing left a big hole in the film world for me. There are great critics like AO Scott, but I don’t know anyone else who can make me see a film differently or appreciate a film the way Ebert did. He will be greatly missed.

Finally, I ask you, my readers, do you know of anyone who I should turn to now?

My mom sent over this video over the weekend and it is great. You’ve probably seen it. If not, it’s a good reminder that sometimes you need to stop what you’re doing and remember to have a little fun every now and again.

If you were given 1% of a company, which one would you take between Quora and Foursquare?

I asked this question two years ago (in 2011) and was pro-foursquare. I then re-asked a year ago when Foursquare was really crushing it and was the darling of the industry. Now, reports have come out that they were unable to raise another round at a higher valuation, were forced to do convertible debt, and only did $2 million in revenue last year. So, the shine is rubbing off. Would I still choose them over Quora? The answer is ‘yes’ although it has less to do with Foursquare and more to do with Quora.

Lately, i’ve become really down on anything advertising-supported. Basically, i think that business model is in the tanks and is only going to get worse. Nobody clicks on ads on the web and the rates are in constant decline. If you’re planning on building a business around it, you better have massive scale – and even then you’d be better off selling something else.

Foursquare could be the next Yelp, and while that’s a disappointment for some, I see that a rosier future than where Quora is headed. Although i have to say that the margin is much smaller today than it was 1 and 2 years ago when we last did this poll.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

I’m a huge fan of self-driving cars. Google’s effort to make a car that drives itself is pretty awesome. If you have read about them, read the Wired article here. Just think of all the time and productivity you would earn if you could have a car drive you everywhere. For all the minutes you’re in a car, you could now be doing something else. It’ll be found time. It’s glorious.

Because of my enthusiasm, I made a bet a few weeks ago here at work. I’m betting that a self-driving car will be available for me to purchase before 3/1/2023.

As if journalists weren’t having a tough time. Today’s cover of the New York Times is further proof that the cost-structure of journalism is crumbling. The cover is an image of Alex Rodriquez and the photo was done from an iPhone and the Instagram app.

Back in the day, you used to have to develop your own photos. Then came digital photography and with that you needed to have some photoshop skills to make the photo look really professional. Now Instagram handles it all, and it looks great. Obviously, an iPhone can’t handle a lot of circumstances, but now lots of people have the skills needed to make beautiful shots that are worthy of the cover of a newspaper.

Chuck Klosterman has a great phrase about Billy Joel. He says that on a scale of white to black, where white is the lamest someone could be and where black is the coolest person in the world, Billy Joel is orange. He’s cool the way your grandpa is cool. That’s why this clip is so awesome.

Here’s a clip of Billy Joel and Vanderville University taking a request from a young kid in the crowd. He could’ve said no. Could have said that he just didn’t have time. But he indulges the kids. And he really let it go. Listen to the crowd when he puts his sunglasses on – you can see the Old Billy come alive. He’s up for the challenge.

I love Billy Joel. I was have. I recently listened to the podcast about him where he talked with Alec Baldwin about his career.

I was wondering why Billy had been married three times. He’d always nailed everything – his music, his image, he always did everything the way you wanted to. Why did he fail so miserably at his relationships? He talks about how when he’s in the middle of an album he can’t turn “it” off. He thinks about every chord and lyric of every song, every second of the day, and he thinks you have to be like that because it’s art and he must get it right. But. As a result his relationships have all suffered and he was never really be there for other people.

Anyway these are two great clips. Definitely watch the video if you have a few minutes. If you have a little bit longer them listen to the podcasts it’s a great one too.

Billy does these college shows. Where he tells his story. Can’t make as much money as he does in an arena, but it’s much more fulfilling, it’s different. And at this small show, he knocks it so far out of the park you become a fan, even if you weren’t one before.

Billy Joel… Wasn’t he supposed to be a joke?

Don’t pay attention to the press. Hang around long enough and you outlive the critics. Don’t forget Led Zeppelin was panned by “Rolling Stone.” And we can’t even remember who wrote the review.

College kids are not supposed to care, they’re not supposed to know. But listen to them ooh and ahh in this clip. That’s what’s great about being young, the moment is the most important. It’s all about the now. Which is why we revere the youth, they’re untainted by experience, they don’t know what they don’t know, and they can let go.

Normally, “New York State Of Mind” is about poignancy. But in this case, it’s like being at Yankee Stadium, Billy is truly playing to the last row, and he has each and every person in the palm of his hand.

And he does Sinatra and acknowledges it.

And the longer he goes on, the more you realize that Elton gets all the accolades, but his old piano-dueling partner is the one who’s still got the pipes. You realize that Billy is an American, one of us.

The little guy sleeps! Yes, he seems to be good at his sleeping. He doesn’t like going to sleep but once he’s there he crushes it from 6-8pm to 6am. It’s a beautiful thing.

I spoke WAY too early. Since then the little guy has been regularly waking up at 3am and crying his face off until we feed him. Um, yeah, that’s not so fun. My bad, internet gods, i promise not to do it again.

The little guy sleeps! Yes, he seems to be good at his sleeping. He doesn’t like going to sleep but once he’s there he crushes it from 6-8pm to 6am. It’s a beautiful thing.

Ever since i was 18, i’ve become really good at not hanging out at my house. I loved to meet people for drinks, go to concerts, parties, dinners, etc.. I used to never go home. I never cooked. Seriously. When Diane moved into my apartment in LA, i still had the shrinkwrap casing on my oven. I had literally never used it. Why do i mention all this? Well, the little guy goes down every night at 6pm and once that happens we are tethered to our home. Every night. We have to be there. And while it’s really great that the little guy sleeps, it’s really weird to have to be inside our home all night every night. I have not developed my hang-out-at-home skills. Any suggestions?

My commute sucks. It’s never really bothered me before but that’s because i was leaving at 7 or 8pm and could cruise sans traffic. Now that the little guy goes down early, i’m trying to get home early and have a new appreciation for why rush hour exists. There went 1-2 hours of my life every day.

I have a new respect for Pixar movies. We just watched Finding Nemo last night and now i’ve seen the Madagascar film a few more times. Those are legit films.

What’s the future of tv network or service? It’s probably a subscription service that:

Has exclusive content

Is available on all the devices you own (TV set, mobile devices, iPad, etc.)

Has a library of great content – both old television shows and movies

Offers on-demand viewing of all it

Who’s leading the effort here? It seems to be HBO and Netflix. Netflix is great for #2, #3, #4 whereas HBO is great for #1 and #3. It seems to be a race for HBO to get on more devices and for Netflix to get more exclusive shows.

Diane and I just watched the entire season of House of Cards and loved it. We plowed through all 13 episodes in two weeks. That’s how we watch most shows (on-demand) and not in HBO’s weekly format. It’s only a matter of time before they all go that way.

For me, I’m putting my money on Netflix. First off, because it’s not part of Time Warner which seems to be stuck in the ways of the past. Second, because Netflix has been pretty aggressive on all fronts and their winning here seems more likely than HBO figuring out the web and devices.

I had the pleasure of working closely with Steve Case the Revolution gang back in the Qloud days. I can tell you first-hand that he is the real deal. He made an appearance yesterday in the Senate and spoke about immigration. Here are some of his statements. All pretty interesting:

1. “Today, 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies in the United States were started by immigrants or the children of immigrants, employing 10 million people across the globe and doing $4 trillion in revenue. Of the 10 most valuable brands globally, seven of them come from American companies founded by immigrants or their children. In the past 15 years, immigrants founded one quarter of U.S. venture-backed public companies.” [Source]

2. “Statistics show that immigrants are almost twice as likely as US-born workers to start a company. Between 1995 and 2005, half of Silicon Valley startups had an immigrant founder. In 2005 alone, those businesses achieved $52 billion in sales supporting 400,000 jobs. In 2011, more than three-quarters of the patents filed at the top ten patent-producing US schools had an immigrant inventor. Of the 1,600 computer science PhD graduates from our universities in 2010, 60 percent were foreign students.” [Source]

3. “The mistake that opponents of immigration reform make is believing that our society and economic growth are zero sum. They are not. More talented immigrants joining the American family does not equate to fewer jobs, it equates to more jobs.”

4. “It is not the case that an increase in foreign talent will increase unemployment for native workers. Studies show that from 2000 to 2007, every 100 additional foreign-born workers in STEM fields created 262 additional employment positions for native US workers.” [Source]

5. “Every year, arbitrary immigration caps force approximately one-third of the 50,000 foreign-born STEM graduates from our universities to leave the country. After earning a Masters or PhD from universities such as Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT, these talented men and women move to competitor nations and launch businesses abroad that compete with our workers here at home. If our military had a similar policy we would train soldiers, sailors, and pilots at West Point, the Naval Academy, and the Air Force Academy with world-class battlefield skills, only to send them away to join the militaries of foreign nations.”

6. “What was once the secret sauce of our economic advantage – a strong entrepreneurial economy that rewards risk, disruption and innovation – is being replicated aggressively around the world. A few decades ago we lost ground in the manufacturing sector when we failed to respond aggressively to global competition. We cannot afford to do the same when it comes to the entrepreneurial sector.”

7. “History teaches us that the most open and inclusive societies tend to be the most successful: Spain in the early 1400s pioneering navigation and global trade; Italy in the 1500s advancing science and learning. But no country has benefited more from immigration than the United States. We began as a startup founded by immigrant settlers who left a difficult situation to build a better life. What distinguishes us is that we have always been a magnet for risk-taking men and women from across the world hoping to start businesses, innovate, and contribute. That is part of our DNA. It is why in the 20th century we created more wealth, opportunity, and economic growth than any other nation.

But that advantage is slipping away. As the economies of developing countries mature rapidly it is no longer the easy choice to settle in the United States. There are now increasingly attractive opportunities abroad. We must improve the environment for entrepreneurship to thrive. Now is the time to work together and pass comprehensive reform that fixes our high-skilled immigration system.”

Back in 2008, Qloud got acquired by BuzzMedia and Toby and I were assigned to running the product and engineering divisions of the company. Buzz owned at the time around 50 blogs around music and celebrities such as Stereogum and TheSuperficial. I wasn’t that familiar with many of the blogs, but i quickly realized that some of them were really good and pretty funny.

Probably my favorite of the bunch was a blog called WWTDD which stands for “What Would Tyler Durden Do” which is named after the main character in Flight Club. The site is not what you would call an example of journalistic excellence. He would post a picture of a celebrity – often a very good looking woman – and usually make fun of her. The difference here is that he’d do it in a really funny and clever way. He did this all day, every day, 365 days a year. It was sort of incredible.

I’m writing about this because the writer of WWTDD wrote a blog post yesterday that the days of doing what he does are over. He doesn’t think it works anymore. He writes:

When I wrote Superficial and then co-created Tyler, there were like 3 other sites (Pink is the new Blog, Perez, called Page 666 at the time, and Defamer). Now every dickhead who’s ever gotten an “LOL” on a message board thinks he can write a website, and almost every single one follows that exact model that I created.

And it does not work anymore. It simply does not. It’s 2013 and that old shit is not good enough. I know what to do and I have been begging to change things. It’s frustrating, and I apologize to people who read the page as I got more and more bored and annoyed.

Unfortunately he doesn’t say what the new model is but he implies that it’s coming. I really quite curious. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Several years ago, the Washington Post convened a series of focus groups to learn why most individuals under the age of 45 did not subscribe to the newspaper. It’s not that people didn’t like the Post, reported the American Journalism Review in an article describing the research project in 2005. The problem was that the respondents – many of whom happily consumed news on digital devices – drew the line at piles of old newspapers cluttering up their lives. According to a Post executive quoted by the AJR, more than one respondent declared: “I don’t want that hulking thing in my house.”

Totally true. I don’t want the actual paper showing up every day and creating another task for me to do. I’d rather just read it somewhere and then forget about it. A few other facts listed that i thought were interesting:

Print newspaper readership ranged from 16% of forty-somethings to only 6% of those in their twenties (survey by Pew). By contrast, Pew found that 30% of Americans aged 50-64 and 48% of those over the age of 65 had read a newspaper on the prior day.

Pew found that only 29% of the American population read a newspaper in 2012, as compared with 56% in 1991 – the first time researchers asked the question.

The newspaper is totally dead. People like me and my age are not reading it at all. The USA Today given to me at the hotel is totally ignored. This is part of a general trend of things we like as stated by Mary Meeker in this 2012 report. Such as:

We don’t want to own CDs, haul around books, buy cars, carry cash, or do our own chores

We will use smartphones to buy, borrow or steal media

We will rent shared cars at home or book shared rooms when traveling

We will hire people to buy groceries or cut the grass

We will use apps from Starbuck’s and Target to pay for lattes or redeem coupons.

We prefer short-term gigs that allow us to arrange work around ours lives, rather than arrange their lives around our work.

I have to say that the new Quentin Tarantino film “Django Unchained” is gory, funny, smart and thoroughly enjoyable. That said, i’ve had people recently complain that it’s not very good. To those people, i would just say that you need to remember that QT is the guy who brought you “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction” – two other films with extreme violence (i.e. the ear-cutting scene or the gimp scene). So, if you’re expecting a nice little action drama about racism, you’ve got the wrong film.

Some things I liked about it:

QT loves his dialogue and he also loves his Christoph Waltz. Putting the two together is like chocolate and peanut butter or milkshakes and Mike Lewis – it makes for some delightful scenes. The way that Waltz is able to dig really deep holes and then pull himself out with his Austrian accent is pretty great. Just like the climax of “Kill Bill” was a conversation between The Bride and Bill, the best scenes in DU are actually the verbal confrontations and not the blood spattering.

Samuel L. Jackson plays Stephen, the head slave at the plantation. In all respects, he considers himself white and to see his turn of racism is quite something. His betrayal of Django and Broomhilde was probably the most hateful action in the film.

There is a lot of violence. As Ebert says, “When QT begins a movie, I believe, his destination is to aim over the top. The top itself will not do.” And he definitely gets there in this film.

With both the violence, the rasicm and the comedy, you really don’t ever know what you’re going to get when watching a Taratino film, which in itself is a gift.

My mom’s mom, Edith Pescatello, is 91 years old and a total badass. Let me just start by saying that is so awesome that she now has her own commercial on GNC. They found her on the street in NYC and asked her to do this. It’s pretty cool:

Just discovered this video (thanks Justin) and have to say it’s amazing. These are video clips done by a group called Bad Lip Reading where they match the words of the person to different words. They’ve done the NLF, Twilight, Obama and more. Here’s the NFL video:

This past weekend i saw three films nominated for best picture – “Lincoln,” “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Django Unchained.”

I liked ZD30 the best, followed closely by Django with Lincoln a way distant third.

Zero Dark Thirty is sort of an incredible film. It’s definitely nothing like the other CIA film “Argo” – that film is much more standard Hollywood entertainment. This film feels like it has a point – it has something to say.

My favorite part of the film is how it depicts sacrifice. In a selfish world where kids growing up want to be a rock stars, want to get more followers on Facebook, and smart college graduates are all headed to investment banks to try to figure out how to make more and more money, it’s almost refreshing to see a film where the central character puts her entire life above herself.

“Do you have a boyfriend? Do have have any friends at all?”

It’s so true that the people who truly end up making a difference in the world do it by dedicating their life to their craft. There a great interview with Billy Joel where he talks about his failed marriages. He says that the problem is that once he starts working on an album, he can’t get it out of his head during the day. It’s there during the day, at night, while he sleeps, all the time. Everything else takes a back seat till that album is done. His marriages just fell apart because of it.

That’s what’s great about ZD30. You have a group of people willing to take on that sacrifice. They are willing to get shot and blown up for their cause. It might not work, but at least they’re willing to do try to do it, all day, every day in a country that hates us being there.

The scene with the head of the CIA,

“I noticed you’ve been working with us since high school. Can you tell me what else you’ve done for us?”

“Nothing. I’ve done nothing else.”

Yep, that’s commitment.

I knew how the story ends when i entered the theater but it’s one thing to see Obama give a press conference and another to be on the ground, going into a house with night-vision goggles. That’s some serious tension.

This just vaulted above “Silver Linings Playbook” as my favorite film of the year.

PS: As for the torture – i don’t know what the big deal is. First off, the scenes are not that brutal (have you see “Django”?). Second, it’s not clear whether the torture did any good to getting Bin Laden. How can you claim the film is promoting torture? Have you even seen it? Come on.

Christian Ponder was pretty awful for a two-month stretch this year, but with 4 games left, the Vikes had to run the table. At that moment, a funny thing happened. While Adrian Peterson continued going absolutely nuts against opposing defenses and Minnesota’s defense continued to step up their game, Christian Ponder got better. How much better? ESPN.com blogger Kevin Seifert puts it into perspective.

But after a disastrous Week 13 performance against the Packers, Ponder quietly turned himself around and had the NFL’s second-best QBR (86.8) over the final four games of the season, trailing only Peyton Manning. Over the second half of the season, Ponder’s QBR on third down — measuring not only passes but also his scrambles — was the league’s second best.

I felt differently though. I found it to be brutally honest and to go for uneasy truths over quick payoffs. And this is the way comedy seems to be headed now. The film feels less like “Knocked Up” and more like a 2.5 hour episode of “Louie.”

“I’d like to think that we’re part of a comedy movement right now that’s moving away from observational comedy and into something that’s more personal and real. But it’s just one person’s opinion — it’s what I prefer because I feel like it has more heart to it. It’s got more teeth. And I feel like in some ways it’s a response to the Seinfeldian era of comedy, which was observational to a point of brilliance. I mean, Seinfeld did it so well, and there were so many mimeographs of that style, and then at a certain point, those mimeographs became so boring … It’s actually more difficult to just tell your story, and tell it honestly, and admit that you’re wrong about things in a way that’s entertaining.”

I can definitely see this happening. It’s in the Louis CK specials and in Lena Dunham‘s “Girls.” It’s a cool trend and I like where we’re headed.

I don’t really listen to entire albums anymore but it’s still fun to look at which albums were my favorite for the past year. I tend to split my time listening to iTunes/iPod and the service Rdio. Luckily, both of them send my play counts to Last.fm so my profile can tell me all about my listening habits this past year.

I have now been using my iPhone 5 for over 3 months and really love it. It’s a nice upgrade over the 4. I like the thinner size, the bigger screen, the faster processor, and the super awesome camera. All things considered, it’s pretty damn sweet. I even have been using Siri in the car to play music and send quick text messages.

There’s a lot of buzz around Apple maps being terrible and some android phones being better. For me, Apple maps have been great although i just installed Google Maps and found that to be even better. I’m sure some Android phones are better or at least come close to the iPhone, but at this point, they are all basically the same. We’re so far past regular cell phones that are just phones that we’re all winners. These smartphones are just ridiculous in what they can do. Quibbling over megapixels, LTE coverage, the number of apps, and features such as turn-by-turn is such a great problem to have.

Read a great essay today. It wasn’t a typical essay but it was a “tap essay.” What is that? Well it’s an article optimized for a device and makes it easy to give it your full attention.

Not only was the content great but the format was ideal. Both are really awesome.

First the content: The writer talks about how the web is full of fun stuff, but not really stuff that makes you stop and appreciate it. Not content that makes you revisit it often. We cruise through so fast and we are quick to recommend and to “like” but we never return to the items we find on the web. We only return to things we really love and that is usually not what we read on the web. Really interesting I’ll spare you all the details but it was an a fun essay to read. You can get it here.

Second, the format. The essay was mostly fun because of the way it was presented. Reading on a phone or iPad is now set up to mimic how you read on the computer. Text is small and you have to scroll. Ugh. Reading this tap-essay, you tap your way through, sometimes word by word. It was fun and it kept my attention the entire way through – which is rare for an essay to do. This was, by far, the best way to read something on my phone. It’s genius.

There is a Betaworks company called tapestry that is making it easy to make tap essays. I tried it out and it’s pretty darn simple to construct a set of screens for your story. Check it out.

I last did a report about life with Hunter when I was 3 weeks in. Since then, I’ve learned a few more things.

Getting up in the middle of the night repeatedly can make a man (and mom) batshit crazy. For us (and most people), the getting up in the middle of the night to feed the child never stops and is totally exhausting. Diane and I are taking turns who gets up for the main feeding in the middle of the night. We found that if the same person keeps doing it, that person becomes not so fun to hang out with. We’ll see how this new experiment goes.

Hunter is not always happy

Grandparents are great to have around. There was a time where I didn’t really want to have my parents around. I had control of my life and an occasional check-in was all that was needed. Those days are over. I desperately want them here as much as possible. In fact, i’ll take anyone who is willing to sit down and do a feeding of our baby. They are bringing the gift of free hands and the ability for us to do necessary tasks. I never thought there’d be a time where i just wouldn’t be able to find the time to pay a bill. Crazy town.

Grandparents are a great thing

I’m also amazed on how I have basically no more free time. When I come home from work, I hangout with Hunter although I’ve realized that if Hunter is in my arms, everything’s cool. If Hunter is anywhere else (except Diane’s arms) there’s a problem and some fussiness and crying. So that means I’ve got a baby in my hands from when I get home until I go to bed. Is it possible to do anything else once a baby is in your hands? Not at all. I basically wash hours and hours down the toilet with that kid in my hands. Every day.

If the above is true, how am I writing this? I’m on a plane headed to the east coast for work. Thankfully, my in-laws are back home helping out as much as they can. I realize that i’m kind of screwing over my wife by making this trip, but i also need to do my job. Being an entrepreneur is also hard work. Kapost needs the foot to remain on the pedal, and I’m trying to juggle that pedal with my baby. I heard someone say today that being an entrepreneur allows for him to “sleep like a baby – where I wake up every 3 hours crying.” and I can really relate to that now.

The election is over and we can get on with our lives. For me, living in Colorado meant that our television stations were nothing but ads either telling us that Romney was a bastard or that Obama was incompetent. I know people who believe those messages and I don’t want to really talk about whether they’re right or wrong. It’s just exhausting.

I loved watching my Twitter feed on election night. I have to say that for live, unpredictable events like disasters, elections, and sports, – twitter really shines. That said, i was also really impressed with the coverage on television. The big board on CNN was way more informative with actual stats than any other medium. They knew where things were going down, when they were happening, and why. Twitter was snarky and fun but TV was actually helpful.

The big winner to me for this election was Nate Silver. If you don’t know Nate, and I didn’t until a little it ago, he’s a guy who first gained recognition for developing a system for forecasting the performance of professional baseball players. One day he woke up and wanted to the same for politicians. Last election in 2008, he built FiveThirtyEight.com (538 is the total number of electoral votes out there) and used his crazy smart algorithms to predict, with really cool charts, who would win. When the final votes came in, he correctly predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 state and all 35 Senate races that year. Way closer than almost every one else.

Remember the scene in Moneyball when all the old scouts were telling Jonah Hill and Brad Pitt that they were crazy, and the scouts needed to be able to see a player to evaluate him? That’s pretty much exactly what happened with Nate after that. Most of the political pundits started to rant about how nobody could predict elections using analytics alone. They were and are totally wrong – it was funny to see.

This election, the NYTImes hired Nate to run his 538 analysis in its own little section of the NYTimes. I started following it during the week before the election and found it fascinating. I continued to watch this posts and analysis all election night and, surprise surprise, he was pretty much exactly right again. Among my friends, Nate Silver is the big winner of this election. Moneyball all over again.

David Brooks, one of the better columnists out there was interviewed by Alec Baldwin a few months ago on the Here’s the Thing podcast. It’s a really interesting interview. The entire thing is here but below is my favorite 4 minutes of the interview is where he talks about the book he wrote and why it’s so important to choose a good spouse.

The first few seconds of this clip below is about his book is about why kids drop out of high school. He found in his research that you can tell in the first 18 months of kid’s life whether they will or not. Apparently, kids who can form attachments at an early age can form emotional attachments with teachers and peers later in life and they’ll generally be okay. If you can’t, life if very frustrating.

The second part of this short clip he shares some of his thoughts on marriage. I found it interesting to hear that he goes around and tells people, “If you have a great career and a crappy marriage, you’ll be miserable. If you have a crappy career and a great marriage, you’ll be happy.” I like the thought of that. If this is true, then all the courses you should take in college should be about who you should marry.

He then talks more about happiness and makes the point that money only correlates a little to happiness and that studies have shown that, of people who are happy, they have a good marriage and that the happiness gain of a good marriage is equal to that of doubling your income.

This may be why I was so willing to quit my job in 2009 – because I was about to get married.

I hang out with some pretty cool people at work. And, i’ve got some great people to go home to too. I capture a lot of moments on Instagram (which i love) and have lately been trying out Snapjoy (Boulder company) and Picturelife as possible places to replace my Flickr as my online photo storage.

Recently though, I’ve come to the realization that it’s not enough. I want to capture more photos and more of my life. Lots of cool stuff is happening every day, both at work and at home that are just passing by. I want to capture those too. So, you can imagine my happiness when i discovered a little gadget called Memoto. What is it? It’s a little square that’ll snap a photo of wherever you are and whatever you’re doing every 30 seconds. This is a 5 MP camera in a tiny little device. That’s 4 GB of photos i’ll be capturing every day. Now we’re talking. Here’s a little video of the device:

I backed the project on Kickstarter so i don’t actually have the device but i ail soon and then you’ll all be jealous.

One other things i’ve been using lately: Strava. This used to be an app that tracks the crap out of your bike rides. But, they’ve now added running tracking in there. Before i stumbled upon Strava, I tested out RunKepper and MapMyRun and liked Runkeeper the best of those two, but after using Strava just a few times, i can tell that it’s better than both of them.

This song has been my go-to song for most of the year – especially when running. It’s just so awesome. There’s also a great YouTube montage video of the best movies of 2014 set to this song. That’s posted below (it’s the 2nd song)

This song is really stuck in my head. I’ve listened to it 5 times already today. It’s just great.

Also, from now on I might not link to the actual mp3 of the song and just put in the Rdio and Spotify link. The Amazon and Dropbox/Box process was taking too long and keeping me from posting songs on the blog. Need to streamline.

Co-founder of Kapost, a content marketing platform which provides workflow and analytic tools for hundreds of businesses (Intel, Cisco, Cengage).

Prior to Kapost, Mike co-founded the social music service Qloud.com, which grew to over 25 million monthly uniques and was acquired by SpinMedia.

Experience

Apr
2015 - Present

Product, Business Travel / Airbnb

Am the product lead for Business Travel

Aug
2009 -
Apr
2015

Co-founder & President / Kapost

As President, Mike manages the Product team and Corp Dev activities. Kapost is the leading Content Marketing platform.

Apr
2008 -
Jun
2010

EVP, Product / SpinMedia Group, Inc.

Ran the Product group at BuzzMedia. Over the course of my tenure, we went from 27 properties to 42 and traffic grew from 30 million monthly uniques to over 50.

Jan
2006 -
May
2008

Founder / Qloud

Qloud was a digital music service built for social networks. It connected a user's iTunes with their online profile and then would submit relevant status messages such as "This is the top song of all your friends" and allow users to listen to an unlimited number of tracks. Among the 8 social networks it was integrated into, Qloud served over 1 million videos a day and had over 25 million monthly uniques.

Primary responsibilities was running the Product team.

Jun
2004 -
Jan
2006

VP, Network Services / Ruckus Network

I held several responsibilities while at Ruckus including running Operations, Video Services, and Product Marketing/Management. Ruckus' products are the only media products to mix social networking and legal media downloads.

Feb
2003 -
Jul
2004

Sr. Product Manager, Business Operations / AOL

Defined future video and audio products for AOL for Broadband. Program Manager for Video@AOL. Created business plan and full P&L models for AOL for BB products and services including Games service, Video services, Digital Media Platform, AOL Platform, and Design.

2002 -
2004

Sr. Product Manager / AOL

Managed the digital media products such as AOL's iTunes competitor, Video@AOL and several other music products.

Jul
2000 -
Feb
2003

Manager, Corporate Technology / AOL Time Warner

· Worked on various projects to develop our technical strategy  including new product development.· Conducted diligence of early stage companies who are potential partners and/or acquisition candidates.· Attended all AOLTW Chief Technology Officers meetings and execute resulting action items

Jul
1999 -
Jul
2001

Founder / Hanover

Founded an online food services company in Hanover, NH. The business put all the menus of the Hanover restaurants online, allowed for students to place orders online and then would route an eFax to the restaurants who would then deliver the food. We'd charge the restaurants every month for every order. Remember that this was 1999. The internet was still new. The business was eventually sold to CollegeExtra.com for very little money.

Jan
1999 -
Apr
1999

Software Developer / Sun Microsystems

As a software intern during my junior year in college, I moved out to California to work at Sun. While there, I did the following:

- Developed a NNTP Newsgroup reader for the Sun/Earthlink STB- Designed a suite of test applets for the QA group- General Web UI work